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“My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone.” – Anne Lamott This analogy packs a punch because it portrays the habits of thought and feeling that comprise our imaginations as spatial, social, and economic in nature. Spatially speaking, when we engage our imaginations, we go someplace. We even refer to neural connections in our brains as “pathways.” The ability to travel within our minds is at once heralded as one of humanity’s great gifts and lamented as one of humanity’s great depravities depending on where we choose to go. The metaphor of landscape is especially powerful here: there are mountains and valleys, deserts, oceans, cities, and gardens in our imaginations, each of which carries metaphorical meaning. When we are involved in the work of creativity, we go places in our minds, hearts, and imaginations. And of course we try to go to good places, but sometimes we get lost. Second, Lamott presents our imaginations as places of social dimension. As a little interior society, there are a myriad of cultures we can visit within ourselves, some of which we are on good terms with and others of which we rarely speak to at all. Of course, in this particular quote, our relationship with the residents of our mind, our “bad neighborhood,” is questionable, tenuous, and even fearful and dangerous. Last, there’s an economic dimension implied in this metaphor. In the little interior society called our imagination, there are thoughts and desires that receive plenty of subsidizing and support, upheld as absolutely valuable and beautiful, as well as wounded feelings we shun, from which we withhold the riches of our time, energy, and attention. I must make a disclaimer here: sometimes in our inner worlds, where there is deep scarring, trauma, and tender wounds, it is important that we stay away from the bad neighborhoods. Brazen confidence in healing our own wounds is just as much hubris as is strategic avoidance of them. If you need to stay away from your bad neighborhoods, by all means, stay away. This is a situation in which we must listen to the Holy Spirit, our conscience, and the needs of our hearts. But, to the degree that we’re able, I think we ought to examine why we perceive certain neighborhoods as bad and others as good. The film Spirited Away helps us ask these questions regarding the spatial, social, and economic dimensions of our imaginations. As stewards of our minds and hearts, we, like Chihiro, open the door to many guests, some of whom are much older and craftier than we are. The spirit in which we treat them has real consequences for their inevitable return visits. Speaking of return visits, my pastor has preached on the way in which life cyclically brings back characters, events, and places from our past and how our encounters with them propel us into the future. He often says something along the lines of, “If I don’t deal with the places of tension and unrest in my story, these places will come up again and again in different forms.” Each recurrence is not a vengeful punishment for not dealing with our issues the last time, but rather an act of grace from our Father, who gives us opportunity after opportunity to make amends with our suffering, to find in our wounds the cruciform pattern of Christ, and to participate in his suffering, following him all the way through death and into rebirth. How might the civilizations of our imaginations be transfigured into a microcosm of the new heavens and earth? Drew Miller As Christians, we believe in the Kingdom of Heaven, in which the world’s measurements of worth are flipped upside-down. We believe this is never glimpsed more plainly than in the crucifixion, when the Trinity suffered, grieved, and endured death in Jesus: a death whereby all creation found solidarity in suffering with its Maker, that even death might be given a sacred role in the Father’s true economy of redemption and resurrection. If we are to be transformed by this story, that transformation must plunge deep into our imaginations, where there is plenty of death and life, disease and healing. So the ultimate questions I’m interested in asking are: How might the civilizations of our imaginations be transfigured into a microcosm of the new heavens and earth? How do we adopt a cruciform posture towards our inner worlds? What economies of our minds and hearts need a good upending? For the purposes of this post, I’ll treat these questions in their application specifically to the creative process. When I first began writing songs in my teens and word got around about it, I endured many a cheap, well-intentioned quip from my friends and family, often in the form of non-sequiturs like, “Well, there’s some material for a song, Drew!” or “That should be the name of your next album!” I was always annoyed by such comments, perhaps because they cast me as a writer gold-mining the very gift of life for my “material.” The thing is, no matter how much fault I find in that metaphor, I have lived by it, impatiently and exploitively, most of my life. I have trained myself to seek out the places in my mind and heart that I associate with magic and inspiration while shunning the places of exhaustion and depletion. I idealize and idolize the land of milk and honey at the expense of the desert. I stay in the “good part of town” and avoid the “bad neighborhoods,” unaware that by perpetuating the reputation of each, I keep them both from the proper restoration and reconciliation they truly need. So now we come to the question: “What makes and keeps a bad neighborhood bad?” This is a question well suited for sociologists and psychologists, but from my own experience, a bad neighborhood is kept bad by my perception of threat. In an immediate sense, I stay away from my bad neighborhoods, the places I consider best left in the dark, because I feel my safety is threatened by them. I certainly shouldn’t visit them alone; I think Anne Lamott had that right, at least. But I would like to acknowledge that my idea of “safety” is often a euphemism for comfort. In the real estate of my imagination, the more I fear neighborhoods of shame, loneliness, and hurt, the more threatening they become. Not only that, but in my fear, I uphold and protect exclusively those places of my mind and heart that meet strict, homogenized guidelines for goodness, truth, and beauty. I lie to myself about the shape of my inner world. As a result, the health of my imagination suffers. I become narrow-minded and engage in a sort of artistic elitism. This is the gentrification of my imagination in which I leave vast interior landscapes to slow deterioration. So if that’s what happens to the places within myself of which I’m afraid, then what’s the fate of those places in my imagination I glorify as productive and abundant? A simple answer would be monoculture, in which only one crop is grown over vast stretches of land, working the soil dry. By analogy, my concern in creativity shifts from the thing I’m making to the making itself. I want productivity. I grow only what I have a taste for, and my taste narrows to that which I grow. I become blind and numb to my work for fear of its failure. I forget that all I put my hands to is a gift of God. In this state, when I happen upon one of God’s good gifts, such as an intuition for a new song or a beautiful chord progression, this scenario unfolds: “A brief entry in a mid-nineteenth-century collection of English fairy tales tells of a Devonshire man to whom the fairies had given an inexhaustible barrel of ale. Year after year the liquor ran freely. Then one day the man’s maid, curious to know the cause of this extraordinary power, removed the cork from the bung hole and looked into the cask; it was full of cobwebs. When the spigot next was turned the ale ceased to flow. The moral is this: the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part.” – Lewis Hyde, The Gift It comes as no surprise that when I constantly take inventory of the wealth of my imagination, I end up trying to seize the good gifts of God rather than receiving them. In my attempts to seize the gift, it turns to cobwebs. This way of seeing dries up its subject. It is in such times of extreme self-consciousness, of dread and shame over dark inner spaces and fearful idolization of spaces I have privileged as all-good —it is in such times that I can’t make anything. What we need to see in the crucifixion of Jesus is the obliteration of all our concepts of beauty. Drew Miller But then, when my heart softens enough to confess my fear, possessiveness, and idolatry, I see myself in this quote all too easily (please excuse the exclusively masculine pronouns): “…man seeks God in the law, and attempts to conform to him through the works of the law, in order to bring himself into the righteousness of God. If he sees and believes in God in the person of Christ, condemned by the law, he is set free from the legalist concern to justify himself. Man seeks God in the will for political power and world domination. If he sees and believes God in Christ who was powerless and crucified, he is set free from this desire to have power and domination over others. Man seeks to know God in the works and ordinances of the cosmos or the course of world history, in order to become divine himself through knowledge. If he sees and believes God in the suffering and dying Christ, he is set free from the concern for self-deification which guides him towards knowledge. Thus the knowledge of God in the crucified Christ takes seriously the situation of man in pursuit of his own interests, man who in reality is inhuman, because he is under the compulsion of self-justification, dominating self-assertion and illusionary self-deification.” – Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God We could riff on that and write another sentence about those of us who seek to make the world beautiful, redeem it ourselves through art, and thus attain God-like status. What we need to see in the crucifixion of Jesus is the obliteration of all our concepts of beauty. God the Father and Spirit calls beautiful in the crucifixion what we could only ever see to be ugly, thereby obliterating our arbitrary distinctions between what is beautiful and what is reprehensible. Only in obliterating these distinctions is it possible for us to be redeemed from our misguided pursuit of redeeming the world through our creativity. Recall with me the character of Chihiro from Spirited Away. She “owns” nothing—in fact, she herself is owned as a sort of indentured servant—and her poverty of spirit enables her to see the true wealth of hospitality and gift in those around her. Likewise, she sees the exploitation and “riches” of her surroundings for what they truly are: alienation and profound poverty. If we take these little parables and metaphors to heart as instructive for a healthy relationship with our own inner worlds, I believe we will look a lot like Chihiro as we hone our art: empty-handed, grateful, and privy to our own illusory notions of what it means to be wealthy and secure in our creativity. By adopting such a cruciform posture, we may even open ourselves up to be tilled by Christ, our desecrated spaces recovered, our overworked fields given rest, and the flourishing of our imaginations more diverse and fruitful than we ever could have anticipated. In being so transformed, the nature of our work will be unable to escape its own transformation: “…tilling was never simply about growing things. Tilling has a double meaning: by working the garden people also learn to work on themselves so that through their work they can be brought more closely to an awareness of God in their midst, and then make the commitment to participate in God’s beauty- and goodness-building ways in the world. In other words, work is ultimately to be about a finer attunement to the world as the place of God’s sustaining presence. With an awareness of God and with an appreciation for God’s intention that creatures be whole and at peace, people’s use of the world can be transformed so that the gifts of life are better cherished, nurtured, and shared.” – Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating Our imagination’s soil having been tilled with such gentleness, we will become gentle. Our weeds having been pulled with such grace, we will become gracious. Our interior landscapes having been reconciled so thoroughly, we will become participants in reconciliation. Newly named “redeemed” by our Father, every work we set our hands to will become a work of redemption.

This is the story I read at Rabbit Room Live 2017. The first part, up to the ellipsis, reproduces one of the first pieces I ever wrote for the Rabbit Room, in 2007 or 2008. I originally published it in an incomplete form. Now, nine or ten years later, I think I’m ready to complete it. In elementary school I had a friend named Donny—a small, double-jointed fellow who smelled of peanut butter. I remember him as having a fuzz-stache for as long as I knew him, but I’m probably just extrapolating back from junior high. Surely he didn’t have a fuzz-stache in second grade, when this story takes place. In the fall of that second-grade year, Donny caught a bad case of pneumonia and was hospitalized for a few days. “Pneumonia,” one of my classmates intoned, shaking her head gravely. “Your lungs fill up. You drown from the inside out.” “Your lungs fill up?” one of the boys asked. “With what?” I didn’t have to ask. I knew what Donny’s lungs would fill up with: peanut butter. I pictured him in his hospital bed gasping for breath, every wheezing exhalation filling the room with the smell of sorrow and peanut butter. In Donny’s absence, our teacher gave everybody a sheet of construction paper and assigned us the task of making Donny a get-well card. I wrote a poem on mine. I don’t remember all the details, but I was particularly proud of a couplet that went something like this: He laid in the bed in his hospital room And looked out the window at the yellow moon. On the front of the card I drew a picture of Donny in a hospital bed, tubes sticking out all over the place, looking dolefully at a crescent moon framed in the window (and wondering, no doubt, if he would ever stand beneath an open sky again; I could be a melodramatic boy when I had a mind to be). Donny recovered, and there was much rejoicing when his mother brought him back to Mrs. Curry’s classroom. My rejoicing, however, turned to bewilderment when Donny’s mother grabbed both my little hands and started speaking to me with a tearful earnestness that I had only seen on television. “Jonathan,” she said, “I can’t tell you how much your card meant to Donny and to me—that you would take the time to write such a lovely poem.” Well, for one thing, I hadn’t taken a lot of time. I had just found some words that rhymed and strung them together into something that made grammatical sense. For another, hadn’t everybody written a poem or something? For the first time it dawned on me that my classmates had probably scrawled “Get well soon!” on their construction paper, scratched out a picture, and moved on to the next activity. Obviously I had overshot the assignment. And this woman, overwrought with worry and relief, had mistaken my poem for a gesture of particular loyalty and friendship. “You’re a sweet boy,” she continued. “Donny is lucky to have a friend who would write him a poem to cheer him up. A poem!” Except that I hadn’t written a poem for Donny. Yes, Donny’s illness was the occasion for the poem, but I wrote it because I liked writing poems. I drew the picture because I liked drawing pictures. I liked Donny and wished him well. I certainly didn’t want him to drown in peanut butter from the inside out. But this woman was misreading the evidence. “Donny’s father and I wanted to give you a little something to show you how much your card meant to us.” She started digging around in her big purse. Now, this was getting interesting. I had heard of people getting paid for writing. I even had aspirations of writing for a living one day. But I had never dreamed of going pro at seven years old! What does a get-well poem fetch, anyway? Ten bucks? A hundred? “We looked around the store for something we thought you’d like.” Donny’s parents owned a convenience store. “And with Halloween coming up, we thought you could use this.” In two outstretched hands, she presented me with a tube of vampire blood. Vampire blood! Who pays a poet in vampire blood? … The piece went on in that vein for another paragraph or so, but it didn’t really go anywhere, because I didn’t understand what happened between Donny’s mother and me. I didn’t understand at thirty-something any more than I did at seven. That utter mismatch between Mrs. Donny’s gratitude and my gesture of innocent artistic exuberance–I only knew how to tell that story for laughs. And it IS ridiculous. What I didn’t understand–not at seven, not at thirty-something–was that however feeble my offering, it met Donny’s mother in a way that didn’t have a whole lot to do with me. Because coming and going, art is a kind of grace. I wrote that piece early in my association with the artists of the Rabbit Room. But in the years since, it has been one of the great gifts of my life to see, over and over again, how the artist does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Over and over again, I’ve seen people get what they need because these artists–my friends–have stayed faithful to their calling. I have seen them pour their hearts out, sometimes in elation, sometimes in exhaustion or discouragement. I’ve seen them wade back into the fray, going back into the dark cave to write another story or song, loading up the van and hitting the road again, putting on the spaceman costume one more time. A couple of years after I wrote the vampire blood story, I went through a writer’s block that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I was overdue on two books–not just behind schedule, but past the due date (and the extensions) on one book and then the book that I was supposed to write after that one. And the due date for a third book was barreling down right after that. The pain of it was multiplied by the fact that I had always been so dismissive of the idea of writer’s block. “Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block,” I used to say. “Lawyers don’t get lawyer’s block. If you’re a writer, sit down and write.” If I could have scraped up the money to pay back the advances, I would have said Forget it–the world doesn’t need another biography of Flannery O’Connor or another novel about the ugliest boy in the world. The youthful exuberance of the second-grade get-well card artist was utterly fled. In the end I managed to push through and deliver the manuscripts, in part because of the example of my friends and fellow artists here at the Rabbit Room, and in part because I remembered people like Donny’s mother, who, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, need what I can bring. In the middle of that hard season, Andrew Peterson, quoting somebody else, told me, “Writing is easy. You just open up a vein and bleed onto the page.” Yes. Amen. I envisioned Donny’s mother, that patron of the arts, holding out that tube of blood and saying, “Here, kid. You’re going to need this.”

It was all Lanier Ivester’s fault. She was the one who had gotten me into this mess. She was the one to blame. Well, okay, fine, to be entirely truthful, my predicament could also be pinned on Sally Clarkson. Those two temptresses had gotten me into this mess. I was alone, in a strange country, and afraid of what would happen next. I was in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood that could accurately be described as “Dursley-ish”—tattered streets and drawn curtains, a pot-holed road winding through beige tract houses. I had taken the city bus, exited a stop too early, and was now all alone, lost, and wandering suburban Oxfordshire. It was just after Hutchmoot two years ago. I had mentioned to Lanier and Sally that I was spending a couple of weeks in England for both work and familial obligations, but that I had three days to myself and was excited to visit my favorite spots in London again. “You should visit Sarah up in Oxford if you have the time,” Sally suggested. “Have you ever been?” “No,” I said. “I haven’t.” “Oh, John Cal, you must must go,” Lanier implored, “It may be too late in the season to go punting, but it’s the perfect setting for a bottle of champagne.” “Eh, I dunno.” I replied skeptically. “Last time I was in London, I missed Harry Potter World and wanted to spend more time in shopping at Harrods.” But they pleaded, and told me about the easy bus ride, the Evensong, and even where I could find a cheap dorm room to spend the weekend. But now I was lost. I’ve been known to be the kind of person that is underwhelmed by life. I’m not sure if it’s my cynical nature, my personal baggage, or that I grew up in Hawaii. When paradise is the touchstone of normality that you measurably compare the rest of life to, you’re bound to be at least somewhat disappointed. I saw the eclipse a few months ago. It was okay. I like dogs fine, but don’t care much for the cuteness of puppies. For five years, I lived in a cabin in the woods on the shores of Big Lake, at the foot of majestic Mount Washington. I could see the lake’s glassy visage from my bedroom window. “You didn’t tell me it was so beautiful here,” my friend Ben Yancer said when he came to visit, Cannon SLR in hand. “Oh, sorry. I forgot.” Even Pete Peterson, when deciding to move Hutchmoot to Christ Community Church, was so elated to have me see the new luxurious kitchen I’d be making supper in. “It’s fine,” I said when he took me on the tour a month ago. “Fine?” he asked, bewildered. “Yeah. It’ll work okay.” I had taken the bus to tour the Kilns, the C. S. Lewis estate, and was so confused that it was in such a normal neighborhood. This was not Narnia or Professor Kirk’s country estate. This was normal, and normal is not what I signed up for. I ambled up a side street and finally found the house. Okay, I thought in my snobbery, this was slightly better than the houses that surrounded it, and after finding the front door, I was greeted by what I’d find out later was a tour volunteer telling me I was twenty minutes too early, and no, there was nowhere inside the house I could wait. The cold exterior dampness would have to do. “You could go walk around the pond out back,” she offered. A pond, great, I thought. “It’s been saved as a nature preserve,” she said, “and quite peaceful. Just be careful in the mud,” she called as I made my way to a rickety old gate. I was in a foul mood after the bus ride and getting myself lost. I would go to an Evensong later, an evening Anglican worship service full of liturgy and singing. I would have a drink in the Eagle & Child, and sit in the other Rabbit Room while texting Eric Peters and Andrew Peterson, trying to find the hidden ledger that Rabbit Roomers are supposed to sign. I would hear the music and inhale a pint of ale. My soul would be soothed—eventually—but as for now, I was having none of it. The pond was muddy, and wearing dress shoes to set myself apart from the “regular tourists” seeing the Lewis estate didn’t help. It was wet and cold, and after five minutes of seeing all I needed to, I found a bench and sat to bide the rest of my time in purgatory. I was so tired from the red-eye the night before that my eyes closed in protest. In the darkness, I began to hear birds singing, and felt the wind’s pleasant chill across my face. In my mind’s eye there was a fox coming up from behind a nearby fallen tree, and squirrels passing notes to the dryads. “Narnia,” I whispered. I could imagine Lewis sitting there, near the pond that was once his, that has since been surrounded by housing developments; and it would be easy for us to picture him mourning the loss of the estate he loved and built, but then again, “It was never about Narnia,” he writes. We must learn what Aslan is called in the reality of our own world. The eventual tour was wonderful and soothing, but it truly was after Evensong, that my soul was satiated. There was a beautiful solo by what seemed to be a college-aged gentlemen—grace and, of course, light, which is the poultice I use for most of what ails me. After the service, however, I saw the same man running the courtyards of the church, his choir robes slung about to reveal the t-shirt and cargo pants beneath. He was at the doors of the campus getting his kebab take away, before what I suppose was a night filled with studying for his engineering exams. The image of fantasy, of imagination and expectation, collided again with reality. Hutchmoot is over tomorrow, but once you’ve left, I promise Aslan is waiting there for you too, though you may have to learn him by his other names. Our expectations of what something is, and could be often get the best of us; and I would like to be clear that I believe imagination is so important, to believe there is something more, something bigger than what we can see. But the images are meant to spur what happens in our . . . realities. So, in honor of Lewis, Chicken Tikka Masala, Naan, and Chutney, and Raita. It’s not perhaps, what we imagine, but these too are real British foods. I hope that the reality of these tastes will allow you courage to face the beautiful realities of your everyday life. I know . . . it’s not the Kilns, or the Eagle and Child. It’s not an Evensong, and it is surely not Hutchmoot, with it’s ever ready community, and comfort, and peace. But we were only ever brought here so we could go back there, back home, with perhaps a little more courage. So courage, courage dear ones. We are all between the paws of the one true Aslan.

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears, While we all sup sorrow with the poor; There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears; Oh, hard times come again no more. ’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary. Hard times, hard times, come again no more. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door; Oh, hard times come again no more. While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay, There are frail forms fainting at the door; Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say, Oh, hard times, come again no more. ’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary. Hard times, hard times, come again no more. Many days, you have lingered around my cabin door; Oh, hard times come again no more. —“Hard Times” by Stephen Foster I wish that’s how it worked, that if just figured out the right song to sing, or the right prayer to say, that a magical box of light would open. I wish God were like a bubble-gum-ball machine and if I stuck in a quarter, I’d get out the exact color and flavor of candy I wanted. But that’s not how it works. It’s been a hard year. We lost friends. They betrayed us, because we were so awfully selfish sometimes. Our kids got sick. Our parents got sick. Our pets were sent off to farms way out in the country. Our husbands abandoned us. Our wives stopped needing us. Houses burned. Relationships burned. Communities were flooded and torn apart by hunger, and wind, and rain, and metal, raining down like fire from the sky. Before I actually got paid to write for a living, I was a chef and a baker for many years, ten of which were at Big Lake Youth Camp just outside Sisters, Oregon. Hutchmoot, reminds me a lot of camp, not just because I’m cooking for 400 people again, but because days were full — wake boarding, and mountain biking, softball, capture the flag, horseback riding, and so much singing. And yes, meals were important too, but we couldn’t let them get in the way of the other adventures. From start to finish, meals took twenty minutes. To this day, I marvel at how that was accomplished. Campers filed in, their food waiting for them as they arrived, and 20 minutes later, 400 people had finished dining, wiped off their tables, and were off to their next activity. Big Lake was also a Seventh-day Adventist Camp, and Adventists observe a Sabbath, very similar to the Jews, setting aside a specific twenty-four hours from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset to rest and connect with God and one another. But Sabbath dinner at camp was still in and out in twenty minutes and didn’t feel very restful or set aside. At some point we decided we wanted to honor a Sabbath, one that we, at least intellectually, believed in. We intentionally set aside an hour —one whole hour — for people to eat, commune, to enjoy each other’s company. The first week we did it everyone was done eating and ready to leave in twenty minutes. It was awfully uncomfortable as we asked everyone to remain seated, to stay, and spend time with one another. We had forgotten how to do it. It got better, easier maybe, after weeks, after years of doing it, after years of being asked to slow down, to rest, to enjoy one another’s company, for a few moments to simply be. As a commandment, Sabbath is mentioned a couple of times to the Jews. One of course is in Exodus in the first reading of the ten commandments. In verse eleven it says that God made the world and all that was in it, and called it good. And so after six days of creating, on the seventh day he rested and blessed it and made it holy. It’s mentioned again in Deuteronomy, chapter five. Remember the Sabbath day, for once you were slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Once you were slaves, but now you are free. Tonight we have the Sabbath meal from Big Lake Youth Camp, the one we used to learn to connect with each other again, to slow down, to rest, to enjoy a few moments pause in communion with God and one another, to, as so many in this fellowship have said, push back against the darkness. Like in Narnia, when the winter is melting, and the brethren are feasting and the witch finds them in their merriment. “It is true,” the squirrel says defiantly. “This feast was a gift.” It is not just food, after all, that she is so upset at, but their protest against the darkness, that in their togetherness lies a belief that good will win in the end. I’m afraid not even this special commandment is a box of magic light. I do my best, most weeks, to observe a Sabbath, and life is still so hard sometimes. And I know, they’re just bowls soups. But I hope that as we feast from these coffers, you are reminded that there is so much good, so much good that we are working together to create in this world, that in creating and enjoying creation, we are adding our own magic light to the story. I know, I know they’re just bowls of soup, but I hope that through them you are reminded that with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, God saved you, that you were once slaves, but now you are free.

[Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the introduction of Thursday’s dinner at Hutchmoot 2017.] Before we eat dinner tonight, I must admit something to you. Truth will always taste better, and so I must make a confession. I’ve always felt different here at Hutchmoot, on the outside, perhaps, if you’d like to use that metaphor. I’m not a Southerner. I’m from a somewhat peculiar denomination of Christianity. I’m don’t homeschool my kids. I don’t have kids. I’m not white, and perhaps the most offensive, especially to Pete Peterson (who, in fact, pointed out this quirk to me, just last week), I have still not watched Star Wars. Yes, still, even after all these years. So when last year, I was asked to think of something “different” to serve for dinner on Friday night, I want to admit I went into it with just the smallest amount of spite. It’s also true, that there was love and care in that meal, in those bites of noodles and vegetables. The story I told you about my grandfather making me bowls of hot ramen is real. The adorable Japanese women at church taking care of me with mountains of pickled vegetables is true. Those things really did happen. I did want you to enjoy your food. But it is also true that there was a little bravado, a little misplaced showmanship, a little “I’ll show them what different is,” a little bitterness mixed in to the offering. And yes, a little bit of bitterness, like in a richly roasted cup of coffee or immaculate square of dark chocolate can make our tastebuds sing. Too much, however, is sure to leave our palates dry and dissatisfied. So what then, as I have been entrusted with this gift of making bread for us to break together? If I am to take a break from ruminating on how different we all are, then I would have to imagine, how we are all so wholly . . . the same. I am a man named after my grandfathers. Cal after my grandfather Calixto, the one who made me all that ramen, and John after my father’s father. He died three years before I was born, and so I never got to meet grandpa John. And since last year’s dinner was inspired by grandpa Calixto, and since the stories food tells are such personal things. I thought I may take a hand at a meal inspired by my other namesake. Still, considering that I was also trying to empty my cup of bitterness, I simply couldn’t fathom what a little old brown Asian man from Hawaii has in common with so many of my white Southern Christian counterparts, dare I say, friends. “He worked on a plantation.” It was honestly the first thing that came to mind, a plantation owned by a Southerner, Samuel Thomas Alexander, son of missionary and Kentuckian, William Patterson Alexander, who started C&H sugar with his childhood friend, Henry Baldwin in 1906. But the earlier boom of Hawaii’s sugar industry coincided with America’s Civil War in the 1860’s, and so the model that was followed by sugar plantations in the Caribbean that used slave labor could no longer safely be copied. By the hundreds of thousands, Asian emigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines began immigrating to Hawaii. And so came grandpa John. He was an irrigation man whose fields yielded more than those around his, and to reflect his hard work, his pay was raised to $1.25 a day . . . for 10 hour days in the field, 6 days a week. He and my grandmother Eulogia raised 15 children on that wage. To control so many foreign workers, plantation owners set up a caste system. Japanese workers got paid more than Chinese workers, who got paid more than Filipino workers, and each racial group was segregated in their own plantation villages, each following a different (mostly unspoken) set of standards for decorum. The Japanese were often allowed to gamble, for instance. The Chinese were not. All Asiatics could only be laborers in the plantations, and were simply categorized as skilled or unskilled. Portuguese immigrants, on the other hand, could be Overseers, but though they were European were not considered white enough to be caucasian, and could not apply to be Field Bosses or any form of management. The point was for them to not get along. But then lunch came, and the thing they all had in common was food. Often too poor for fresh fruit or vegetables, lunch was usually rice and a little left over meat from last night’s dinner. They passed around the dishes their wives had made and slowly, over plates of something delicious, they began to appreciate each other’s differences. Today, the tradition is known as the Hawaiian Plate Lunch—Korean Kim Chee, Teriyaki Chicken from Japan, Filipino Lumpia, Chinese Char Sui, Portuguese Malasadas. In the ’40s, when WWII was in full swing, Spam and macaroni and potato salad were added to the traditional lexicon, plucked from the rations sent to feed the thousands of American soldiers occupying the islands—a myriad of tastes from seemingly disparate cultures creating something new. Tonight we eat plate lunch: Kahlua Pork Sandwiches, Sunomono Cucumbers, Roasted Lomi Lomi Tomatoes, my dad’s potato salad recipe, and even hummingbird cake, to honor what the South can do with ingredients like coconut and pineapple. Hutchmoot is getting bigger, and the rabbit room is changing. There are more faces, new faces, and so as we widen the circle and break bread together, may we be reminded that yes, we can be friends, that the sum of our parts is more delicious than any one ingredient alone, and that there is room at the table for us all.

She sat in the second row amidst a noisy gaggle of fourth graders. She was petite and olive-skinned, and her dark eyes measured me as I paced back and forth and pontificated about matter ethereal and authorial. I could tell, from her sharp, sensitive answers to my questions, that stories were seared into her soul, branding her for a calling that perhaps even she did not yet recognize. After her classmates had exhausted their inquiries about my writing, my age, my dog’s name, and the magical source of all ideas, she quietly raised her hand: “When you were our age, were you ever lonely?” Her eyes were so direct, her question stated so simply and honestly, that it was perfectly clear what she was asking: Were you ever like me? Is it possible to feel so alone, so different from everyone else, and still grow up to be the kind of someone I want to be? I couldn’t, in that room full of a hundred children, run to her and throw my arms around her. And I doubted very much that she was the only one who harbored such a question in her heart. So I answered her as simply and directly as she had asked: “Yes. Yes, I was lonely. I was so shy and quiet that boys would tease me in order to see who could get me to talk. And yet in my books I found friends. As I read and wrote stories I became other people, I went on adventures, and I found out more about who I was.” I wanted to tell her: The loneliness will end. You will find your place. I wanted to tell her: The world is full of lonely people, and someone else is looking for the friend that only you can be. But those are only half-truths. It would have broken my heart to speak the whole truth to her or to the nine-year-old version of myself that I saw in her eyes: You will continue to be lonely for a long time, and your loneliness is the furnace in which fine metal will be forged, and out of that place of inner fire will rise your art. For you will be a writer someday, and words will come from those places in you where speech is muffled and still. * * * I have no idea what it is like to be an outgoing, extroverted writer. I can only speak from the perspective of someone who scores 99% on the introvert scale—who still, after having had many so many dear friends in my life, pushes constantly against a wall of shyness, who still feels lonely in the midst of loving community. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the feeling of being the Picassoesque face in every crowd—slightly disjointed, slightly askew, poised on the edge of normal but too cockeyed to be cool. You would like me, surely, if only my left ear were not hanging crookedly off the end of my tongue. But along this introverted journey I have learned a thing or two about loneliness and community and art. When I was four years old, my pre-school teacher told my parents never to let me close myself up in my room by myself—because she could already see the tendency in me to get lost in my own mind, to bury myself in my imagination. (My parents didn’t tell me about this conversation until I was an adult. Growing up, I assumed it was a universal rule that children were not allowed to close the doors of their bedrooms.) That teacher was prescient; she saw the warning signs of a lifelong struggle. I had no right to be a lonely child. My family was extremely close and unfailingly supportive. I did not look different from my peers or even act much different (except for being quiet). The real problem was that I was too deep for my own skin. I was always standing apart from the world, analyzing it, taking it in, mulling over it. My thoughts, questions, fears, and dreams were buried so far under the surface that I did not know how to scale that chasm back to the land of other people again. It was like pulling a heavy bucket of words up from the bottom of a well; there was just too much. It was too hard. Sometime around age thirteen, I discovered the following poem in a literature textbook: A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.  And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. I didn’t know who Walt Whitman was. I had to look up promontory, filament, ductile, and gossamer in the dictionary. But I knew that this poem was about me, as surely as if my name had been written at the top. I was that spider. The poem expressed precisely how it felt to grow up as a shy, overly thoughtful girl. I hugged it to my heart all through high school. And then, in college, my favorite professor told me something that was the complementary truth to my pre-school teacher’s warning: “The time you spend alone with your books and your art is not wasted, and it is not selfish. That solitary learning and growing will make you a better friend, a better wife, a better mother, a better teacher.” This acknowledgment and affirmation of my introversion, like the Whitman poem, made me start thinking about aloneness as the necessary fire that launches us into community. I have heard so many people make fine distinctions between solitude and loneliness, saying that in the solitude of creativity we are alone but not lonely. Because of course solitude is the incubator of a writer, or any artist. It forces you to develop a rich interior life. The mastering of an art—and the nurturing of those disciplines of contemplation from which art grows—requires vast amounts of “alone time.” Stories and poems emerge from silence. Their birthplace is a quiet gasp of wordless wonder. Except that so often the solitude of art-making is lonely. Deeply, painfully lonely. And I think somehow it must be, to a certain extent. If you are an artist by nature, then art comes out of that place in you that cannot be shared with another human being except in this creative form. It gives a voice to inner things that otherwise could not be spoken, inner things that make you who you are in your truest moments. Flannery O’Connor said, “The quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.” Peculiarity and aloneness. Don’t most of us feel that way? And yet this sense of disjointedness and isolation can be the very source of the peculiar word that we alone can speak. If we were perfectly “normal,” perfectly loved, perfectly understood, perfectly aligned with the contours of the world we find ourselves occupying, would there be anything left to say? There comes a time in our childhood or adolescence when we learn that the world is broken. Not only that, but we are broken, like Humpty Dumpty, and we cannot put ourselves back together again, even when we are surrounded by well-meaning royal helpers. Loneliness is the gaping hunger of the cracks. But the grace of art is that it thrives in broken soil. And that is why, when I saw that fourth-grade girl, full of loneliness and imagination, I saw the seedling of an artist. I saw someone who, like me, had a secret room inside. Who probably, like me, was longing for someone else to come and fill it. But no, I thought as I looked at her, seeing my own nine-year-old self, if another human being could come into that inner room and fill it up, you would stay there forever, never emerging from the cocoon of your own dreams. The fact that no one can come into that room, but you still need to share it, forces you take the precious things in that room with you and leave it—and that is a creative process, a movement outward. It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself . . . Here is the paradox: You cannot make art except by being alone, and yet you cannot be an artist in isolation. Along with that wonder born in solitude comes an irrepressible urge to turn to someone else and tell him or her about it. The creative impulse in you speaks two things. First: Make this. Then: Share this. Do not hold it tightly to your chest. Cast it out of you and let it fall. Then cast it out again, and again, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold. I have come to believe that in order for art to be art, it must be given: creativity is at its heart an act of self-giving, and it is given in gratitude for having received something. It is an act requiring great courage—courage to stand in that lonely place and at the same time to be conscious that one is surrounded by faces, and to be constantly reaching out of the loneliness into communion with the world. Art is always reaching. Here is a further paradox: In order to not be alone you must go by the way of aloneness. In order to find one who can receive your words you must have the courage to first send those words on the journey out of your self into a world that may not receive them. You must fling that gossamer thread out across those oceans of space—and flinging is not a safe, calculated movement. It is reckless abandon. It is a motion of both carelessness and joy. And you will be rejected. You will find yourself, sometimes, in community (because it is still community whether you like it or not, whether you are happy or not) with people who are utterly different from you, who have opposite interests and concerns, who do not understand you and whom you do not understand, and yet they could be the very people from whom you will learn the most, who will hone the edges of your spirit until it grows gentler in the friction, and to whom you must learn to give yourself because that is when the gift is hardest and riskiest and therefore valuable in its frailty. The loneliness from which your art arises may give you insight into some deep empty place in the heart of humanity, and your unique expression of that need might be the mirror in which others can finally see themselves and know they are not alone. So by forming the fruits of our solitude into words or pictures or music, we turn loneliness into love. That work of art—that story—that poem—becomes a third place, outside of my heart and yours, yet bridging both. My husband Pete says he could not have written his novels about Fin Button today, because marriage has taken away so much of the emptiness and sadness that was the fuel for that story. Yet how many thousands of people was he unwittingly loved through that story spun in a bachelor’s empty room? I was single until I was 36, and the years leading up to marriage were pockmarked by moments of searing loneliness that will always remain part of my own peculiar experience. The gossamer thread that finally caught and held to another person was art. I offered my story—the story that had pulled me out of myself and into the world—to one particular (and equally peculiar) man. He offered his story to me. And those words wrought in our separate solitudes became the first bridge between us. But even in marriage, even in the midst of likeminded community, even when we finally find those people who will shelter us from the burning glare of the great alone, we (at least we introverted artists—I cannot speak for anyone else) always ebb back into a solitary hidden place inside that is only ours, that we cannot explain to anyone, that no one else seems to see or understand, and yet we are so driven to share it that it must come out in artistic expression. This place is the spring in the mountains from which flows the river that will bless all of those precious people in our lives. It is the place of prayer, and it is the place of art. Because in that innermost place we are most aware of the things that transcend us. Is it possible to create from a place of fullness, joy, belovedness, and belonging? I am sure there must be, but I don’t know what the art of perfect wholeness looks like, because as far as I’m aware no broken person on this broken earth has ever made it. I don’t know what songs Humpty Dumpty will sing when he is put back together again, yet I wonder if even then the quality of his art will derive precisely from the peculiarity of the cracks from which he was healed. I have been deeply lonely in my life, and I have been deeply loved. And I would not part with either of those experiences, for they both have been necessary to set me upon the journey I’ve taken. And so this is all I want to say to her, in the end—to the beautiful dark-eyed girl who stands on a solitary promontory, spinning her gossamer thread: Fling your silken soul far out into the world, little spider. It will catch.

I don’t know about you, but I had fun this weekend. From an amazing Rabbit Room LIVE (Sho Baraka!) to Fernando Ortega (“He’s come for the pimples!) to John Cal (“Hard Times Come Again No More”) to David Taylor’s laugh (and his wisdom) to Doug McKelvey’s epic delivery of that liturgy on Sunday—oh, and Ashley Cleveland, and Arthur Alligood, and Jason Gray, and Christopher Williams, too. There was so much going on that I can scarcely recount it all here. I enjoyed every inch of Hutchmoot, and I hope that’s true for all of you. We’ll be taking a few days (the week really) to recover. If you’ve ordered from the store during the weekend, we apologize, but it’s going to be a few days before we get back on top of things. Bear with us. The office is in tatters, boxes everywhere, and we’ve got to sort through it all to regain our sanity and our shipping schedule. We’ll be sending out a survey in the coming days to collect constructive feedback, but in the meantime, tell us how the weekend struck you. What did you think of the new venue, the modified format, the increased audience? What are you taking home from the experience? If you are the blogging type, this comment thread is a great place to crosspost any writing that comes of your time at Hutchmoot. And if you’re an artist or a doodler or a poet or anything else, we’d love to see any work the weekend inspired.

SOLD OUT—Join us tonight at Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee, as we kick off Hutchmoot 2017 with our annual fundraiser. We like to describe Rabbit Room LIVE as the Local Show pumped up to 11. It’ll be a fun night of music and stories from folks like Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters, Jill Phillips, Andy Gullahorn, The Gray Havens, and Andrew Osenga. And when we say we’re turning it up to 11, we mean we’re bringing you special guests like Fernando Ortega and Sho Baraka. And there’s much more. More performers, more storytellers—you don’t want to miss this show. And if you aren’t local, don’t despair. The show will be live-streamed on Facebook Live. And that too will be new and improved. We’ve got a full production team on the livestream to provide (multi-camera) video and audio coverage for the event. And it’s entirely free. Be sure to “like” the Rabbit Room Facebook page in order to be notified when the show begins. The Rabbit Room is a non-profit organization and we rely on your donations to help us do what we do. As you watch the show tonight, consider helping us fund our 2018 programs by making a tax-deductible gift at donate.RabbitRoom.com. We’ll see you tonight!

Hoist the mainsail and wave goodbye to the shore. The ocean is a wide adventure full of majesty, mystery, danger, and beauty, and it’s all captured in this week’s Rabbit Reads selection, a small but mighty nautical yarn. The main character in Set to Sea is unnamed. He’s an aspiring poet, an oversized landlubber, and he hears the call of the sea. This means nothing more than maritime poetry on the pages of his journal, until he finds himself thrown headfirst—and quite against his will—into everything the sea has to offer in all its rollicking, harsh, brutal fury. Set to Sea is a delightfully unexpected book. Harsh and wild, lyrical and thoughtful, it spins a nautical yarn that explores the scope of a life full of unexpected turns, finding significance in both the big and small moments, the dramatic and the mundane. The book is unassuming—simple in plot, short in pages and small in dimensions, but it packs a wallop, astonishingly evocative and effortlessly, impressively textured. The graphics reflect the range of the story, combining wild cartoon art—clearly influenced by E. C. Segar’s Popeye comics—with some of the most deftly-rendered environments you’ll find in any picture book. For the record, this is not a kid’s book—there’s some sword-and-musket violence, nothing too graphic, but probably enough for a content warning. I can’t overemphasize the word ‘poetic,’ and not just because the main character is a poet. Each page in the book is a single drawing, and those drawings read like words in a poem, carrying on the rolling cadence of the story while drawing the reader in to dwell on each one in more depth. I find myself rushing through the book, caught up its momentum; I also find myself pausing on this page or that page to feel, to ponder, to explore. And like a good poem, this one is worth multiple visits. You never know what new things you’ll discover when you Set to Sea.

In case you missed it, Sandra McCracken recently released a gorgeous live album called Steadfast Live. I had the pleasure of discussing this project with her a couple weeks ago. Below is the transcript of our conversation. You can learn more about Steadfast Live here. Drew: You’ve said before that this group of songs—Psalms, God’s Highway, Steadfast Live—is moving away from singer-songwriter music and towards gospel songs. To me, that sounds like moving from a subjective to a collective consciousness of what it means to sing together. I’d love to hear you talk about what it means to make that shift, as well as all the out-workings of singing collectively. Sandra: That’s an interesting question for me because my answer is always evolving. For a while I was characterizing it this way: the singer-songwriter music I’ve written for the majority of my career is comprised of narrative-based songs, as opposed to gospel or worship songs. But lately I’ve realized that the songs I’ve written and adapted from Scripture, both from the psalms and from other places, are not any less narrative-based than my singer-songwriter music. They’re just somebody else’s narrative I’m embodying. So it’s still personal, it’s still emotional, but it’s someone else’s words. I think my latest evolution of wording around that would be that there are many different kinds of narrative songs. The idea of a collective voice holds very true for me, though, that these songs are meant to be sung together, to bring people together around common themes of loss and restoration. That is such a shared human experience. Loss is not far from us at any time. So the practice of singing together is a balm and a comfort. That’s how we experience the comfort of God: by singing together. Which is unmistakably a weird thing to do. So the idea of singing together pushes back against that individualism and says we are a community. Sandra McCracken It seems countercultural right now in a more pronounced way than in other times of history. We’re in a time of such isolation. Even music is often experienced individually through ear buds in a private context. So the idea of singing together pushes back against that individualism and says we are a community. We’re not alone in this. It’s not bad to listen by yourself, but there’s a different kind of comfort when we walk together. Drew: If your perspective on this individual-versus-collective dynamic has shifted over time, then what has that shift looked like from Psalms to God’s Highway, and then to Steadfast Live? In that process, have certain songs acted as key sites of that shift? Sandra: Yeah, definitely. These past three albums have all occupied the same sort of age of my career. They hold together in vision and intention. Certain songs have become important threads: “Steadfast,” “We Will Feast In The House of Zion,” and “God’s Highway.” Those three are strong pillars that represent this time period for me. My hope is that these songs would ask the five hundred year-old questions. In turn, I think the songs that endure are the ones that ask questions we will still be asking in five hundred years. So to flesh that out, I live in my subjective reality—how I’m feeling today, the circumstances of my life—but when I go back to the psalms and realize that David experienced the very same range of emotion, and that I can experience his subjective reality through his words, I realize my own reality is not just me; it’s all of us. It becomes collective then, whether I like it or not. So my intention with these last three projects has been to follow that lead rather than falling for the notion that I can initiate some revolutionary new idea of my own. I’m not the first one to feel what I feel and there’s comfort in that. Hopefully these moments of historical connection will lead us to make art that is not disposable, but lasting. Drew: Speaking of lasting art, you deal so much with Scripture in these songs. I would love to hear about how you engage with Scripture in songwriting. How has that practice developed for you and what role has it played in this age of your career? Sandra: When I was fifteen, almost sixteen, I went on a six-day backpacking trip in Colorado. There was still a lot of snow; it was early June. So we were crossing rivers, sleeping out in the rain under a tent that leaks on your face, and so on. I remember on that trip having this slim Bible in my bag. I remember how hard the trip was physically, how I was pushed to my limitations. I feasted on the words and hung on them in a way that I never had before. I felt myself to be frail and in great need. It was all about the nourishment of the Scriptures to give me strength when I needed it. So similarly, in the last four years as I have gone through some life challenges, I have gone back to the Scriptures. I don’t want to watch TV or numb out. I just want to survive whatever the challenge is—the same practice I learned as a kid on that backpacking trip. The songs from these last three projects came from finding my footing, my voice, what I wanted to sing. I was also writing other songs at that time, and at first I wasn’t sure what to do with all of it. There was a stream of songs that were David’s words, and then there was a stream of songs that were my words. They were both narrative songs that show the faithfulness of God, but in completely different artistic applications. At the time when I released Psalms, I wanted to plant my flag with those ancient words and not my own, not because I was embarrassed of my own, but because I wasn’t ready. I wanted to lead with proclaiming those five hundred year-old questions. And I think it’s been fruitful, not just in terms of provision for me, but in the lives of other people who have resonated and felt the comfort of God through these songs. And now the stream of songs made up of my words has been compiled into another project called Songs from the Valley, which I will release in February. Drew: And that’s the only true way in which your own words can emerge. You can’t really lead with your own words; you have to acknowledge the context of the ancient ones. Sandra: It’s really an offering of first fruits. By leading with those ancient words, I was offering my work back to God. Drew: It sounds like a sacrifice in the sense that your offering ensures the abundance of the entire crop, so to speak, including your own words. And that sheds light on the distinction between our words and the five hundred year-old ones, right? It’s a good question whether that distinction is even real. Sandra: It’s an important question to ask. I think in our time, in Nashville, when considering what it means to make music, it’s a perpetual discussion. It kind of goes back to that Abraham Kuyper quote: the Lord says, “There’s not one square inch of this creation that isn’t mine.” And yet we have choices about how we present a piece of work, whether you’re a painter or a sculptor or an educator. If you’re a teacher and you teach third grade math, there are so many ways you could teach third grade math, but you have to come up with some sort of system to get the kids from September to June. In the same way, Psalms was one particular choice of how to walk through these songs. And hopefully making that choice is freedom. I believe the Holy Spirit motivates us through our desires. This is what I wanted to do. The Spirit was with me, leading me in the path I needed to follow. It brought me joy, too. Getting to go into that room with those musicians and record those songs brought me a lot of joy. All those things work in tandem in a mysterious way. Drew: I’d love to follow that thread—vision and desire working themselves out in this series of choices you’ve made as you’ve cultivated these songs. So is it true to say that your Vespers Tour and Steadfast Live came from the same vision and intent? How did the tour lead into Steadfast Live? Sandra: After God’s Highway, I toured with All Sons & Daughters for a while. I had been through a season of lots of work—so much touring, so much work both with church and at home in Nashville, and on the road—and I was really tired. I got to the point where there was more than I could do. So it made me aware of the question: what do I want to do? As I began reflecting on that, when I put pen to paper, the idea that came together was the Vespers Tour: to create an evening loosely inspired by evening prayer in the Anglican tradition. My original hope was that every night, no matter where we were, it would start at sunset, which was so impractical—you can’t put that on every poster! But I was going for the meeting point of day and night, using that to reflect on the day together as a metaphor for the bigger picture of life. The setlist for those shows was very similar to the arc of Steadfast Live. We edited it down for the recording a little bit and brought in some guests. Another part of that journey for me was this book called Essentialism. We toured the Vespers Tour and then I came home and had three months off. The first of those three months was Advent. In our church tradition, it’s a time where you make space for Christmas coming, for Jesus’ birth. It’s similar to the time before Easter where you have to carve things out before you add things in, which is very different from the American way. But during that time, the emphasis on spaciousness and stillness really influenced the sound of the Vespers Tour and Steadfast Live. That book Essentialism was a big help. It reinforced that question: what is your unique contribution? Don’t just say yes to every offer. What are you uniquely made to do? I think Steadfast Live is the answer to that question for me. It’s where my heart is. I want to make space for people to lament, a safe environment where they can come with their questions and find the comfort of God by joining their voices together. Drew: With something like Steadfast Live, you are performing, but you’re inviting people into a different kind of experience at the same time. Is there any tension there while doing a show, since you want it to be worshipful? How do you navigate that? Something that keeps coming into my mind is just how many assumptions our culture brings to what it means to release an album and play a show. Every step of the way, you’re inviting people into a different perspective of what it means to share music. How does that happen when you’re moving from a congregation to an audience? Sometimes, engaging with an audience in worship as prayer looks like leading a musical interlude intended to hospitably bring them in. Sandra McCracken Sandra: That’s another element that benefits from my asking the question, “What do I uniquely bring to this?” I have toured with some musicians who come from the school of thought that every lyric is up, every audience member is singing from the downbeat to the end of the show—it’s all very corporate singing-based. I can do that, but my forte is a little more nuanced. For example, I won’t put up lyrics for the verses of “Almighty God,” but then I’ll invite people to sing the word “hallelujah” in the chorus. In “Trinity Song,” they’ll pick up the melody, and the words are simple. I had a talk with Leslie Jordan about this the other day: if someone is not singing, it does not mean they’re not worshiping. Sometimes, engaging with an audience in worship as prayer looks like leading a musical interlude intended to hospitably bring them in. I invite them to follow me through the lyrics, trusting that they’ll have a moment to jump in as well. Drew: That sounds like a conversation. Sandra: Yeah, so I try to do something that’s blended, where every once in a while I throw in a hymn and give the audience words so they can really dig in—so we’re singing “All Creatures Of Our God And King” or “Be Thou My Vision”—it just lifts them up. Do they like that song more? Well, it’s the interplay that’s magical. If you as an audience member were just singing for two hours it would be a different experience. But you’re carried along by the currents of collaboration. Drew: And it seems to me that this is a microcosm of the five hundred year-old conversation you’re experiencing with David in the psalms. He’s taking the microphone for a moment, but then he asks you to sing with him. Sandra: So true. One of the things—and I need to spend some more time writing about this—but one of the things about the psalms, speaking of what you just said, is that they change point of view so often. You wouldn’t find it in a literary text in the same way. You would have points taken off for writing that way in English class. Drew: Right, because it’s confusing. Sandra: Yeah, rule number one is to keep a consistent point of view. But my question is what if we don’t? What if we were made to constantly shift our perspective? I think it all holds together in the prayer to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Somewhere in the mystery of that, our point of view will have to shift. Leaving room for that and then letting it play out in our time of singing together is so important. Drew: That is so rich. I’m reading a book right now by Norman Wirzba. Do you know him? Sandra: Yes! Not personally, but he’s tremendous. Drew: Have you read Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating? Sandra: He’s been at Laity Lodge before. He’s at Duke Divinity, right? Drew: Yes, he leads Theology & Agrarian Arts over there. Your thoughts are reminding me so much of what I’ve been learning in his book. Last night I read a chapter on sacrifice and the idea of offering your first fruits to God. He quotes somebody else, who says that sin can be defined as “the anxiety of membership.” In the face of realizing how ridiculously indebted we all are to each other, we are anxious about how much we owe. That has this huge conflict with our need for a consistent perspective. You mentioned English class, asking, “Who is the narrator?” I wonder how much that springs up out of this anxiety of membership—the need to say I am here, you are there—rather than loving the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself. Imperative in that command, to me, is the confusing of those distinctions between me, my neighbor, and God. So Norman Wirzba talks about how eating, just eating, involves us in the lives and deaths of all creation. There is sacrifice, no matter what, in every piece of bread. There are so many little deaths leading up to that piece of bread. So I’m curious if you have any thoughts off the top of your head about how this anxiety of membership plays out in music culture, in Nashville especially, and what it means to lead people in a different way. Have you bumped up against any funny moments there where you have to reset the tone and retrain listeners in a collective mentality? Sandra: Working that out as we were developing the flow of The Vespers tour involved trying some things and realizing they didn’t work. So there was some discomfort. Sometimes there are nights when I really want everyone to sing and they just won’t, so maybe they’re more reflective or stoic as a group. In different parts of the country, some people are more reserved than others. So they might be with me, but I feel like I lost them, and then I end up turning inward and having a hard time staying with them myself. So that, to me, is the anxiety of membership. It’s awkward. Drew: It’s that clumsiness, right? And we’re so not into that as a culture. Anything to avoid the awkward moments. Sandra: We want to put people at ease. Drew: We’re not very well trained in that collaboration of efforts, so when we try to do that, there is palpable anxiety in the room. Sandra: And I want people to feel at ease, yet even in our practice at our local church, being comfortable with awkwardness is a point of maturity in community that is very underrated. It’s what distinguishes me from being an entertainer—if I was called to be an entertainer, I would feel much more of an obligation to keep people at ease throughout the course of an entire evening. But my calling is different. It is to facilitate a prayerful, contemplative environment. That takes the pressure off. I might not be slick. I might say something weird or miss a cue or take a minute to tune my guitar. It might be quiet for a second; can you stay with me in that? And I need to practice knowing I’m loved even if no one likes it. That needs to be a regular part of my habit. Drew: All those things are surprisingly hard. Sandra: They are. Anxiety of membership, that term, I get it. Drew: We’re always trying to smooth out the rough edges. Sandra: That’s what’s so healing about a church community that truly takes heart in this humbling practice of reshaping our affections, reforming the habits of our hearts, but also says we come as we are. We come with the anxiety of that and membership is promised and sealed on our behalf. We’re free to be awkward in transitions. We need it every week, not because we’re slow to learn it, but because we’re so constantly bombarded with another ethic that would say, “you need to have it together.” Drew: When you performed Steadfast Live that night, in the face of this entire struggle between those two ethics, was there any tension for you? You were performing this show that’s just the same as the others, except there are cameras. I imagine that would augment this whole struggle. You’re being filmed in your humanity. Did you feel pressure to smooth it out? Sandra: For sure. The performance and time on the date when we recorded Steadfast Live was purposefully relaxed. The crew was so good at being invisible that it was easy to get used to their presence. We were already in that room for two days just getting set up and hanging out, which helped as well. It was an unfamiliar experience, though. We did one performance during the day and the same one at night with a full audience. When we did editing, there were some moments when I was long-winded, so we got to edit that down. We tightened it up a little bit, and that’s part of making a record as well. You want it to sound right. We didn’t replay anything on this, but we had two performances of each song so that if we needed to pull something from the afternoon, we could. I think there were one or two songs where we preferred the afternoon performance. “Justice Will Roll Down” and “Love Will Bring You Home,” I believe. But there is an extent to which we have to smooth things out. Drew: I’ll ask you one more question, and it’s a devotional question for people who want to develop a relationship with the psalms and Scripture in general that gets them started in the right direction of walking into this collective conversational relationship. What words of advice would you have for folks who want to do that themselves? Sandra: My first thought would be to take the words with you and to read them early and often. To take that analogy from before, if you’re on a backpacking trip and you think you can’t carry one more thing, bring the psalms. Carry it, hold it, be nourished by it. For better and worse, it will become electrified when you need it. In suffering and loss, those words will resonate. In other emotions, too: when you’re angry or full of joy, wherever you are, you will find resonance in your life experience. I think we’re encouraged even within Psalm 119, to tuck those words into our hearts, to draw from them, that the Spirit would draw from them in the course of our day. Sometimes I read a scripture in the morning and it doesn’t have much of an immediate effect on me. But then during the day, something will come up and there will be a word that resonates at 11:00, and then there will be something else at 2:00, and by the time evening comes and I’m reflecting on the day, I’ll realize that Scripture has come alive to me because I submitted myself to it in simple practice. The Spirit will cause those words to take root and turn into little green sprouts in our hearts. They will bear fruit. Drew: So just put it in the context of your life and let the day unfold. Sandra: Right. And it’s not something we have to do for ourselves. He does the work of that. Let him do the work. Drew: Take the pressure off. Sandra: Yes! Just rest. I led a catechism last night on prayer in relation to worship, and one of the questions we talked about was, “What is prayer?” Prayer is responding to God in thoughts and deeds, with or without words. I think that takes some pressure off. We can relax and live our lives knowing that he is with us.

I had forgotten how Europe smells, that sweetly acrid bouquet of flowers and cigarette smoke, men’s cologne and diesel fumes. I had forgotten the song of unknown tongues filling the air around me, and the colorful jostle of humanity that is an international airport terminal. Instantly I remembered the bewilderment of jet lag and culture shock, the wholesome singularity of the outsider, the sudden necessity of a bank machine—but I had forgotten how much I loved it all. We stepped out into the pallid May sunshine, my friend and I, regarding a maze of construction barricades, directional signs, and rental car lots. My heart thumped painfully as I clutched the plastic fob of the key the woman had handed me at the Europcar counter. The only thing I was not looking forward to on this gift of a European adventure was driving in Italy. My friend is French and, as such, a woman of decided (and generally correct) opinions. On the subject of the Italian Autostrade she was of the opinion that my metro Atlanta was a far better preparation than her Paris for the daily Grand Prix of Milan traffic. I had looked into alternate means of getting to Bellagio, nestled an hour away on the Alps-girdled shore of Lake Como, but trains were too unpredictable and private cars too expensive. There was nothing for it but to drive. I hoped Delphine didn’t notice the slight edge of terror in my voice as we laughed and chatted our way across the parking lot. When we saw our car, however, we both stopped laughing. A white whale looming above the coupes and hatchbacks all around it. And brand new—I don’t think it had been driven since it was first poured into this parking spot fresh off the assembly line. Leaving our luggage in the middle of the road, we squeezed alongside, cracked open the doors, and slid within. Delphine placed the suction-mounted navigational device on the windshield and I pulled up the Google Maps route I had saved to my phone, trying not to think about the dire warnings I had practically memorized out of the guidebook about steering clear of the Milan Tangenziali at rush hour. Glancing at the dashboard clock I curled my fingers over the wheel until my knuckles stood up like tiny white mountain ranges: ten minutes till five. “I think we should pray,” Delphine said, after we’d collected our luggage and re-stuck the TomTom device to the windshield for the second time. We did, clutching hands over the console. I thought of Rose Arbuthnot in Enchanted April, when she and Mrs. Wilkins stood, drenched and bewildered, before their dreamed-of Tuscan villa. “We’re in God’s hands now!” Rose cried, between claps of thunder. I knew exactly how she felt. The ring road was a real-life video game, a high-stakes bumper car ride. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, as if that would help me see better, scarcely daring to blink for fear of missing one of the Fiats or Ferraris zooming around me like moccasins whipping past a lazy water spider. There’s something of the primordial swamp about driving in Italy—it’s very much a sink-or-swim situation, wherein the fittest not only survive, but sprout scales, fins. Wings. I squared my shoulders and lowered my foot on the gas pedal. My phone was yelling at me in feet and miles, while the TomTom, usually from the floorboard at Delphine’s feet, was screeching metres and kilometres. Both of them were telling me to cross four lanes of traffic, take this undecipherable exit, then cross back four lanes once more. I must have exuded a confidence I did not feel, for in between retrieving and re-attaching the TomTom, Delphine was catching me up on the news in her children’s lives, asking questions. “Delphine, darling,” I said, without taking my eyes from the road, “I love you, and I haven’t seen you in four years. But can we not talk right now?” She understood. But her evident ease soothed something in me. My knuckles started to turn pink again. I remembered weaving through the Dolomites with my husband a number of years before, unable to enjoy the white-capped vistas and rocky gorges for the guardrail-less stretches of road and the lorries that kept riding our tail then careening past us on hairpin curves. Philip loved every second of it, shifting down at the inclines and navigating the long tunnels cut straight into the heart of the mountains. But by the time we reached Florence there were fingernail-shaped bruises on his arm and I was limp as a dishrag in the passenger seat. It was rush hour (of course), and traffic and construction conspired to reroute us along narrow alleys, unmarked streets, even the occasional sidewalk. “I need a glass of wine,” I told him when we pulled up to our pensione at last. I was already calculating the days until we had to get in that car again and drive to Venice. Couldn’t we just walk to Venice? Driving to Bellagio with Delphine, however, I realized something rather startling: it was actually more frightening to be a passenger in Italy than to drive in Italy. Behind the wheel, you’re in control: you’re mentally one step ahead, and adrenaline-laced as it is, it’s an undertaking you’re prepared for, engaged with. Passengerhood, on the other hand, is the most helpless feeling in the world. I began to be aware of Delphine’s passengerhood as we gained the gorgeous SP583 skirting Lake Como. Here, an endless series of one-lane blind curves cling to wooded shores above a sapphire expanse. Villas gleam out, pearly and golden, among the trees. Clouds banked against a sunny sky blur the distance with dreaming hazes while lacquered taxis skip weightlessly over the water, cutting swaths of white wake into the blue. It’s nearly impossible to keep your eyes on the road driving around Lake Como, a fact to which the miles of low, lakeside walls of stacked rock attest. Delphine started to shift in her seat, clutch the armrest, catch her breath. “Oh, do you see—,” she’d splutter, as a car met me head-on at one of those curves, backed up, hiked its wheels into the hillside to pass me. Or, “You’re really close over here,” craning her head out the window to judge the distance between us and those low rock walls. “Delphine, look at the lake!” I laughed. Lanier, look at the Dolomites! The shops were closing when we reached Bellagio and began to ascend the steep road to the Via Garibaldi by which our little hotel was accessed. I made a sharp, impossible left past the prominent No Entry sign (our proprietor had assured us it was the only way), and nudged our shining white behemoth into the cobbled lane. Shopkeepers leapt to snatch their wares out of our path and small dogs barked from doorsteps as Delphine and I bumped along the narrow route, collectively holding our breath as if to make ourselves smaller. When we finally reached the postage stamp-sized parking lot at the Piazza Della Chiesa, I half-expected to find silk scarves and leather handbags hanging off our side-view mirrors. Our hotel, midway down the Salita Plinio, could only be reached by foot, and we reached it rather breathlessly, tugging our suitcases over deep cobbled steps never meant for 21st-century travel. The proprietor, whom we privately nicknamed Papà, greeted us with characteristic Italian exuberance and offered to show us to the way to the private “box” across town wherein we could stow our car without fear of vandalism—or worse, ticketing. “Do not be frightened,” he said, cramming his motorcycle helmet over a shock of white hair. “It is not as far as it seems.” We realized how necessary his caution had been as we followed his scooter through the cramped streets, struggling to keep pace with the zigzagging form. But I’d pored over maps of Bellagio, and I knew that what was inconvenient by car was easy and charming by foot. I wasn’t concerned about finding our way back to the hotel. What was frightening, however, was the size of our box, and the hair’s breadth of an alley within which I was to ease our car into it. Papà parked his scooter and began gesticulating and shouting instructions, but I was too focused to pay him the least attention. “I think I need to get out,” Delphine gasped. I inched and crawled, a millimeter at a time, wriggling that four-door monster backwards into its box. I’ve never considered myself a good driver; I nearly failed my initial exam over the parallel parking segment. But when I shut off the ignition and slithered out of the two-inch crack the box afforded, I felt like I’d just won the Talladega 200. I thought Papà was going to kiss me. “Never,” he said fervently, “never in all my years, have I seen a woman park like that.” That evening, Delphine and I sat out on our little terrace sharing a pizza and a bottle of Chianti. The sun was just flinging out its last glints and blushes across the lake, and the air over our heads was thronged with bell-song and homing swallows. “We are going to look back on this time for the rest of our lives,” Delphine said meditatively, in her lovely French-inflected English. “Mais oui,” I murmured. I was thinking about the miracles that had brought us here: my intercontinental flight, our reunion in Paris, the two decades of friendship leading up to it, the loving husbands at home who had made this trip possible. I could not see the sunlit days ahead, the hour in the hat shop over straw chapeaux, the lakeside lunches. There were wisteria-hung gardens in our future, ferry rides across the lake, sweet silences in contemplation of the same view. I knew, as always, that Delphine would make me laugh until I cried, and cry until I laughed again, but I could not imagine how, amid the olive groves and gelateria of Italy, she and I would regain the insouciance of a happy girlhood. On our last day, we took a drive into the mountains overlooking Lake Como. We were seeking guidebook-variety scenery: what we found, after a couple of wrong turns and the utter failure of GPS navigation, was a staircase in a hillside and a secret trattoria and a terrace nestled in a break of trees. From that height, lake, mountains, and villages felt like a personal possession, a small treasure we could pocket and carry home with us. We could even see the church tower and piazza of our own dear Bellagio. We ordered cappuccino and talked little. After coffee, we wandered down the road, crafting crowns for each other out of wayside flowers; in all of the pictures we’re laughing our heads off. As we walked back to the car, I wrapped my fingers around that plastic key fob with a painful throb of joy. It felt like a handful of gold. This essay was first published in the Art House America blog, February 2017

When it comes to worship music, there’s no better place to start than Scripture. The Psalms give voice to our deepest longings and highest praise, and the words of truth are words of beauty. Sometimes, familiar passages lose a little magic in their familiarity though, but a different approach can give them new life. If you love 1 Corinthians 13 but are starting to see it as “the wedding passage,” then perhaps a fresh take on old words is just what you need. The Corner Room has done just that with their brief and lovely composition Love Never Ends. Using the words directly from the ESV, Adam Wright and the worship collective from Cahaba Park Church in Birmingham, AL build familiar words into a lush, symphonic 12 minute suite. Blending piano with strings arranged by Grammy-nominated composer/arranger Don Hart, the familiar words sway, dance, and skip along with a haunting melody, breathing new life into this timeless passage. This isn’t The Corner Room’s first venture into Scripture-based songwriting though. They’ve also released a collection of 10 Psalms set to music in Psalm Songs Volume 1. Here’s their take on Psalm 23. Not only is the music beautifully composed, letting the words shine on their own, but the videos are beautifully made too, turning the words themselves into art. If you’re looking for a way to mix more Scripture into your life, whether as a soundtrack to prayer or a place in the rhythm of your days, The Corner Room is an artist worth getting to know. You can learn more and buy their music at their website.

How can songs make us cry in a matter of three minutes? Andrew Peterson has investigated this question many times. If you’re interested in investigating it further, here’s a case study for you: “She” by Laura Mvula. Mvula is a British songwriter with both an ear for sophisticated composition and a heart for simplicity. Her songs are thickly layered with inviting textures and adventurous melodies, yet they give off an air of sparseness, reminding us that not all space is meant to be filled. “She” is the first full song Mvula ever wrote, a fact that I feel is nothing short of downright silly in the face of its honest to God magnificence. The song chronicles the story of a young girl traversing the major events of life, including a major death in the family, falling in love, and having her own child. The music video is a work of art on its own. Its aesthetic reminds me of the film Tree of Life with its proclivity towards a sort of speechless symbolism. The one-shot style of the video lets the viewer be a fly on the wall, beholding the cyclical, recurrent events of life almost from the bird’s-eye perspective of time itself. The veil between Mvula’s world and the viewer’s own is paper thin, perhaps to remind us that in a very real sense, the distinction between the two is not so real as we think. Above all else, the pleasure of this song and its accompanying video is that, in the simple fact of their existence, they encourage me to notice the tremendous amount of invisible effort that was put into their every detail. “She” is a masterful work beckoning me to listen, not for lack of listeners, but for the abundance of the gift it has to give. And maybe that’s the reason these three glorious minutes draw tears from my eyes: in their beckoning, I remember that the ordinary time of my daily life beckons as well, urging me to listen to the master work of the One who holds time and its many lives and deaths in the palm of his hand. That’s enough of me rambling. Watch and listen, and I hope this song can be an anchor of gratitude in your day as it has been to me many, many times.

In Week 4 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group, we’re wrapping up Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. We’ve been having some great discussion about race, justice, reconciliation, and hope, and if you haven’t joined in, we’d love to have your voice in the conversation! Looking ahead, we’re taking next week off for Hutchmoot, and returning on October 10th for final thoughts and reflection. Feel free to comment on this week’s questions, continue discussions of past questions, or catch up on reading over the next week or two. “That they were giving an award named after a beloved prime minister who had been tragically murdered by a deranged man to someone who represented people on death row revealed a lot about their values.” (p. 251) What values can you infer from this award? What values can you infer from our American institutions and practices? What are your values? There’s a moment where Joe asks Bryan, “Who is your favorite cartoon character?” Who is your favorite? Look again at Stevenson’s list of four institutions. (pp 299-301) Research one (or more) you feel unfamiliar with. (Perhaps also research one you do feel familiar with; does your understanding change or your attitude shift in this research?) Why do we throw stones? What would it mean to be a stonecatcher in your own context or circumstances? Click here to join the discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum If you’re just joining us, you can catch up here: Book Group Introduction and Reading Schedule Week 1 Questions and Discussion Week 2 Questions and Discussion Week 3 Questions and Discussion

Hey, folks. It’s Monday morning, just over twelve hours after the Rich Mullins tribute show ended. It was, for everyone involved, an unforgettable experience. The audience were wonderful, the band just killed it, the guests and the crew and the management poured themselves out. I’m really glad I wrote this intro for the souvenir booklet a few weeks ago, because after last night, I have no words. Many of us have a Rich Mullins story. This is mine. The first time I met Rich Mullins was right here at the Ryman. Backstage, to be exact, at the exit door by the security desk. I tell you this with some hesitation, because I’m not proud of how it all went down—downright embarrassed, to be honest. It was November 12th, 1995, on the Brother’s Keeper Tour, which featured a full band along with Ashley Cleveland and then-new artist Carolyn Arends. I lived in Florida at the time, and was a persistent (read: annoying) and passionate (read: obnoxious) young Bible college student who had written about fifteen pretty bad songs and therefore felt called by God to be Rich Mullins’s new best friend. Like I said, I’m not proud of this. I was a student at Florida Christian College, which is now a part of Johnson University, and part of the reason I was in college at all was my discovery of Rich’s music. Three years earlier, in 1992, I had long hair and was playing in a super lame rock band, unsure of the Christianity I had grown up with. Then a friend named C.J. gave me a Rich Mullins tape and asked me to learn “If I Stand” on the piano so he could sing it in church. I took the tape and a boom box to the church late one night to figure out the song. Little did I know I was about to be ambushed. The way I usually tell it, it was as if God reached his holy arm out of the stereo, through the lyrics of the song, and plunged his hand deep into my shadowy heart—then turned on a light switch. All at once I was weeping. Light seemed to be shooting out of my pores. It’s no exaggeration to say that that one encounter with Jesus through the music of Rich Mullins altered the course of my life and led me by the grace of God to this stage tonight. After that fateful night I dove deep into Rich’s music and found my heart drawn toward Bible college, something that would have been unfathomable even six months prior. I met my wife the first week of school at an ice cream social for the freshmen (since, other than ping pong, that was all we were allowed to do), and Rich’s music was responsible in part for our first kiss. Jamie and I were in her Dodge Daytona on the way to sing hymns with some other students at a nursing home, and I was trying to figure out how to tell her I wasn’t ready to date anyone. The World as Best as I Remember It, Volume II was playing, and the triple-threat of “What Susan Said,” followed by “Growing Young,” followed by “All the Way My Savior Leads Me” drew my attention to the big Florida sun going down over the cow pastures beside the road. I pulled over. We climbed out and sat in the tall grass with our backs to the car, listening to Rich as the sky caught fire. As I explained to her all my stupid reasons for not wanting to get serious, the songs and the sun and her gorgeous hair kept tugging my face closer and closer to hers. “What am I doing?” I said out loud, mostly to myself. “I don’t know,” Jamie replied, “but I wish you’d hurry up and do it.” No joke. While Rich’s music played we kissed till the sun was completely down and a cop pulled over to tell us to go make out somewhere else. We’ve been married for twenty-two years now. Thank you, Rich. It was during Bible college that I started writing my first real songs and doing my first real concerts, usually at Sunday night church services and youth conferences. Since I only had a few of my own songs I filled in all the blanks with Rich’s. I sang “Growing Young,” “Home,” “Hold Me Jesus,” “Peace,” “The Waiting,” “Sometimes by Step,” “Who God Is Gonna Use,” and more, always fighting back tears as my faith in, love for, and gratitude to Jesus were bolstered by those songs. Singing them night after night was reshaping my heart, rearranging my imagination to make room for the possibility that God was someone worth knowing and that he might actually love me. As much as I loved Rich’s songs, it was the God he sang about that I was enamored with. Back then the internet was a new thing, and the only way to get online was with the one computer in the college library, via a dialup connection. Every day I went to the cubicle and loaded the Rich Mullins fan page, which I think was called “Calling Out Your Name,” to read concert reviews. I ached to see Rich live, and to maybe meet him to tell him how grateful I was for his music. I also ached for a mentor, someone to teach me songwriting, and to help me know how to be a steward of the gift people told me I had been given. The problem was, I was a selfish kid, audacious and opinionated and foolish—and yet, at the same time, I belonged to Jesus and was on what would turn out to be a long and painful road to realizing how terribly broken I was. But that came later. Right then I thought if I could just meet Rich, maybe he would like me, maybe he would see that I had something to offer and would help me know how to offer it. That was when I drove up to Nashville for two reasons: first, because I was scouting it as a place my new bride and I might move to after graduation, and second, to see my songwriting hero in concert. The show, of course, was wonderful. During her set, Carolyn Arends took a photo of the audience, which was my first clue that the Ryman Auditorium was someplace special. Her music was so good, and I’m glad to now call her a friend. Ashley Cleveland was funny and passionate and slayed us all. But I just loved watching Rich do his thing. Those of you who saw him live know what I’m talking about. There was nothing quite like it. Something about his concerts made it easy to believe that God was real, and that Jesus actually loved us the way the Bible says he does. There was something about the semi-detached look on his face while he sang that convinced us that the God he was singing about wasn’t an idea, but was an actual person—a person Rich knew. My Bible college roommate Mark had just moved up here and had a job at a little studio on Music Row, so the afternoon before the show I recorded two demos—terrible demos, mind you—of two terrible, terrible songs. But like I said, I was audacious and thought that if I could just get those songs into Rich’s hands, maybe he’d listen and like me and I would have a shot at a career or a mentorship or maybe just a shot at feeling less invisible. So here’s the embarrassing part. I snuck backstage after the show (a small miracle, given the reputation of ushers at the Ryman), stood in a crowd of Rich’s friends, and like a fool tried to get myself invited to the post-show hang. I know, right? I’m horrified now. I wish I could go back and stop myself. I feel like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption talking to the parole board about how he wished he could go back and talk sense into that stupid kid he used to be. I was a nuisance, and if you were there that night and remember it, please know how sorry I am. I have since prayed that God kept Rich from listening to that demo, and that he forgot me completely. Fast-forward a year, and I met Rich again. I’m less embarrassed by this encounter, but only just. He and Mitch McVicker played a show for my college, mainly because I badgered the staff guy in charge of concerts. I volunteered to be the food guy, which meant I got to take Rich’s and Mitch’s dinner orders. (They both ordered Outback steaks, by the way, which, now that I think about it, is a strange thing to eat just before a show.) When I met him this time around I just said, “I’m Andrew. I’m the food guy,” hoping he didn’t remember me from before. During the show, Rich told the story about how David only killed Goliath because he was bringing sandwiches to his brothers—and then he glanced at me in the audience and said something like, “There’s nothing wrong with being the food guy.” After the show I gave him a copy of my indie EP, which I sincerely hope none of you will ever hear, and he stuffed it in his dulcimer case. I also remember being intensely jealous of Mitch, wishing he’d get strep or something so I could fill in. Years later, after Rich died and Mitch and I had done a few shows together, I bashfully said, “You want to know something crazy? We actually met years ago.” He nodded. “Yeah, I know. In Florida.” Cue the needle scratch. I was appalled that he remembered. “Well,” I said, “sorry if I germed you guys. I gave Rich a copy of my record, and I’ve always wanted to ask….” I took a deep breath. “Did you guys ever listen to it?” He laughed. “Yeah,” he said with a grin, “we kind of hated it.” I love that story so much. Jamie and I moved to Nashville in the summer of 1997. I got a job at the Olive Garden, she got a job as a babysitter. In what I believe was the intervention of the God of Abraham, I met the band Caedmon’s Call and they graciously let me open for them at a few shows that fall. The highlight of each show was getting to come out for the encore and sing a verse of “Hope to Carry On.” They were friends with Rich, and I hoped that maybe he’d show up at one of their shows and hear my songs. Maybe that would redeem the fool I had made of myself at our first few meetings. Then on September 19th, just over twenty years ago, Jamie and I got home from a date and a friend who was staying with us at the time stood in the kitchen with tears in his eyes and gave us the news that Rich had died in the wee hours of the morning. Of the many things I grieved that day, one very selfish one was that I never got to hang out with him. I never got to pick his brain about lyrics, or about movies, or about Jesus. I never got to be his friend. Looking back, I see a young man on the verge of a music career that would wound him in innumerable ways, even as it blessed him tremendously. I see a young man doing his best to follow a calling without having the slightest idea how—other than the example set forth by Rich, who at least seemed to be more interested in following Jesus than anyone’s advice. And yet, what I wanted then, and want now, is to be able to just give Rich a call and commiserate, maybe have a Guinness and talk books, or express to him my befuddlement about the nuts and bolts of following Jesus when all I ever seem to do is fail at it. I’m older now than Rich ever was, but I still feel like that dorky twenty-year-old who has no clue what he’s doing, who most days can’t believe that Jesus loves him. Since I never got to be Rich’s friend, all I had was the songs. So many of you in this room carry memories of your friendship with this guy, and all I really have is the knowledge that he didn’t like my music. Many times I’ve wondered if the fact that my career began just as his life ended was actually the mercy of God—maybe he wouldn’t have liked me, and that would have hurt a little too much. So instead I got to be one of a handful of artists who have traveled the country for decades and tried to keep his songs alive. I’ve never made it a secret that I’m a dorky fan of Rich’s songs (if we had time I’d challenge you all to a sing off; I know his lyrics better than I know my own), so after I sang, “Rich is on the radio, and I think we ought to take it slow,” on my first radio single in 2000, I got something as good if not better than a friendship with my hero—I got to be friends with his friends. I met the Mullins family out in Wichita with Mitch, I played a bunch of shows with Eric Hauck and Michael Aukofer, two Kid Brothers of St. Frank. I went on Compassion International trips with Keith Bordeaux, sat at the bonfire out at Rich’s Ashland City house with Connie Hawk and Steve Cudworth and David McCracken, and eventually got to know Reed Arvin. Because they knew I was a fan, people around the country would tell me stories about crazy stuff that Rich did. One person told me he used to show up unannounced at some house in Florida and trade room and board for a concert on their organ; another gave me a handful of acorns from an oak tree in the woods in East Tennessee where he used to sit and pray. I’ve heard hundreds of anecdotes, most of which I can’t repeat. Last year Steven Curtis Chapman gave me an amazing birthday present: Rich’s copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, the book that inspired lines in “Creed” and “Growing Young,” and probably more. Kathy Sprinkle and Beth Lutz entrusted me with the lyrics to “Mary Picked the Roses,” and Gabe Scott and I set them to our own music, which amounted to a post-mortem cowrite. For all of these stories, and for all of you who have stewarded them well, I’m profoundly grateful. In the years soon after Rich’s death, whenever I covered one of his songs, the crowd would go bonkers. But about ten years ago I realized that fewer and fewer people reacted. More recently, whenever I play something like “The Love of God” or “Land of My Sojourn” I have to tell most of the audience who wrote it, and then when there’s still no reaction I have to say, “He’s the guy who wrote ‘Awesome God,’” and then they know whom I’m talking about. There are always a handful of hardcore Rich fans at my shows, but the army is small and getting smaller. This, as you know, should not be. It makes some sense, however, when I go back and listen to the records. They do, in fact, sound a bit dated (and I think Reed would agree), but what music doesn’t? Not only that, Christian music isn’t the same as it was then, so people have to sort of push through their modern pop-worship sensibilities to hear how brilliant the songs are. But on every album, if you listen for it, there’s an undeniable fire of talent burning through the sounds of the 80s and 90s. And with each record, that fire grew brighter and brighter as the production grew more and more organic. By the time the two World as Best as I Remember It albums were out, Reed and Rich (along with Beaker, Jimmy A, Billy Crockett, and the other players) had found a sound that set things up perfectly for the masterpiece that is A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band—as if it was the bottom of the ninth and a perfect pitch sailed toward the perfect batter. The Ragamuffin Band album, in my opinion, is one of the finest start-to-finish albums ever made. While some of Rich’s most popular songs came earlier, and while we may have favorite individual songs on other records, I don’t think any of the other albums stand up as complete works of art like this one does. When I describe what I love about the songs of Rich Mullins, I usually reference the album title Winds of Heaven/Stuff of Earth. It’s that mashup of lofty poetic language (“From the place where morning gathers you can look sometimes forever till you see what time may never know”) and gritty, earthy imagery (“Two lonely-eyed boys in a pickup truck, and they’re driving through the rain and the heat, and their skin’s so sweaty they both get stuck to the old black vinyl seat”) that makes his lyrics so uniquely Rich. But it’s not just the lyrics that do it—it’s the music too, thanks in no small part to Reed’s production. I’ve always loved the way songs like “Peace” have such tasteful instrumentation—that gentle piano part, Jimmy Abegg’s melodic guitar lines—right there next to Chris McHugh’s explosive, majestic drums. The same thing happens in “The Color Green.” First there’s that quiet, rolling piano, then there’s the soaring string section. Stuff of earth, then winds of heaven. And that was Rich’s life, too. I’ve heard stories about his vagabond tendencies—his hitchhiking, cigarette smoking, barefoot, unshowered self—right there along with his brilliant Chestertonian wit, his obvious love of literature and film and Scripture and theology. And then he just comes right out and says it in the title of this album: liturgy meets legacy. Ancient Christian worship meets American heritage. A good Midwestern boy on a hammered dulcimer—there is no folkier folk instrument—meets a sweeping orchestra and an Irish whistle. It’s no wonder that Rich loved Chesterton, who always used paradox to convey the mystery of God—who is both the infinite Lord of the Galaxies and the lowly Nazarene. I never knew Rich Mullins. Most of the people on the stage tonight didn’t. But we knew his songs. And because he was such a remarkable person, sometimes I wonder if the people who were always around him paid as much attention to his songs as we did. Maybe the largeness of his personality overshadowed what he was writing. One thing I’ve noticed is that the people who knew him talk more about him and his delightful oddness than they do his songcraft—evidenced by the fact that when I saw the Ragamuffin Band on tour after Rich’s death, they struggled to remember the lyrics. But the lyrics were all the rest of us had, and they were enough. They were enough because they always pointed us toward Christ, always realigned our compasses toward the God to whom our allegiance is due, the God who is the giver of all good things. There have been plenty of memorials to Rich’s life over the years. Tonight is our chance to remember and to honor his work, and the work of those who were on the journey with him. In the Pursuit of a Legacy film by Steve Taylor and Ben Pearson, he says, “If your ambition is to leave a legacy, what you’ll leave is a legacy of ambition.” Tonight is a celebration of the legacy of love that Rich left us in his music, which is not a love for music, but a love for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you had told me twenty years ago, on the day that I found out Rich died, that I’d be standing on this stage tonight, surrounded by such good friends, playing these songs for a sold-out crowd, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. If you had told me that night at the church piano in 1992, as I wept like a man who was longing for his home, that God would let me sing for him for these twenty years, I wouldn’t have believed you. I didn’t think God could be that good, that generous to the likes of me. I wouldn’t have thought that love could stoop so low. But here we are. C. S. Lewis wrote an essay called “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In it, he describes the difference between looking at something and looking at its source. He saw a beam of light coming through a crack in the roof, and found it beautiful. That’s a good thing. But if you go and stand in the light and look along the beam, he said, you can see through the crack to the trees and the sky outside. What we’re doing tonight is looking at a lovely shaft of light. Don’t stop there. Come stand in the beam, look through the brokenness where the light gets in, and gaze at what lies beyond it. Behold the world that is more real than the air we breathe, and behold the source of the light, which is the Word through whom all things were made. Remember, I beg you, after tonight is over, after the music fades and the lights go down and you close your eyes, that the stories are true. There really is a God. There really is good news, and it really is worth singing about.

Rabbit Room LIVE is coming up in just over a week! This year’s fundraising extravaganza features a litany of our favorite artists and last week we announced one of our special guests: Sho Baraka. This week we’re pleased to announce a second special guest, one that is no stranger to most of you: Fernando Ortega. Fernando’s music has been a soundtrack for the lives of a lot of people here in the Rabbit Room. His records are what I often think of as “Sunday morning music,” and much like Audrey Assad, he’s got a gift for writing songs that lull me into a place of contemplation and worship. He’s just released his 20th (!) album called The Crucifixion of Jesus and we’re enormously excited that he’ll be joining us for this special event. Get your tickets here, and if you can’t make it to Nashville, don’t miss the livestream! The Rabbit Room is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and Rabbit Room LIVE is a fundraising event. Please consider making a tax deductible gift at donate.RabbitRoom.com.

Every Moment Holy is almost finished! It’s scheduled for binding next week and we’ll have copies on hand for members to pick up at Hutchmoot. We’re happy to announce that pre-orders are now open. Click here to secure your copy of this limited edition, leather-bound, gold-gilded, hardcover book. Pre-orders will begin shipping on November 3rd! Here’s another look at a liturgy from the book. “A Liturgy for Those Who Suffer Loss from Fire, Flood, or Storm” from Every Moment Holy [Click here to download.] Leader: O Christ in Whom Our Lives are Hidden, People: fix now our hope  in that which alone might sustain it. O Christ in Whom Our Treasures are Secure, fix now our hope in you. In light of all that was so suddenly lost, O Lord, in light of all we had gathered but could not keep, comfort us. Our nerves are frayed, O God. Our sense of place and permanence is shaken, so be to us a foundation. We were shaped by this place, and by the living of our lives in it, by conversations and labors and studies, by meals prepared and shared, by love incarnated in a thousand small actions that became as permanent a part of this structure as any nail or wire or plank of wood. Our home was to us like a handprint of heaven. It was our haven, and now we are displaced, and faced with the task of great labors—not to move forward in this life, but merely to rebuild and restore what has been lost. Have mercy, Lord Christ. What we have lost here, are the artifacts of our journey in this world, the very things that reminded us of your grace expressed in love and friendship, and in shared experience. It is for these reasons we grieve the loss of our home and its contents—we grieve  them for what they had come to signify  in our stories, for they were charged  with such meaning and memory,  and woven with so much that is eternal. O Father, we have suffered a hard loss, and one that we cannot endure alone. May we emerge in the months to come—even in our frailty—stronger than before, more deeply rooted in you, and more wrapped in the necessary arms of community. Give us humility to receive that which we need and cannot repay, when it is offered by others. We thank you for the presence of friends who would share this burden of grief  simply by showing up in the midst of it,  and grieving with us.  We thank you for small mercies and kindnesses extended. For the grace of thoughtfulness translated into the tiny details of life.  For beauty. O Lord, let us not lose sight in our grief, of all that is yet bursting with beauty in this world. Let us not lose sight of the truth that we live in the midst of an  unfolding story of redemption, and that  even this loss of ours will have its counterpoint at the great restoration. Indeed, for anything spared and salvaged, we give you thanks. Let us see that even in disaster, there is grace still at work, for you know the limits of our hearts. Be with us now as we sift and clean, as we slog merely to reclaim some fraction of that which we  once took for granted. Be with us as we navigate the countless details that must be tended and decisions that must be made between now and the time that we begin to feel normal again. Be with us as we slowly recover from the shock of sudden loss,  enough to begin to imagine what the  restoration of our home might mean,  for to build again a thing that we know might easily be lost, must be an act of faith. Let our rebuilding be a  declaration that a day will come when  all good things are permanent, when  disaster and decay will have no place,  when dwellings will stand forever, and  when no more lives will be disrupted by  death, tragedy, reversal, or loss. So by that eternal vision, shape our vision for what this temporary home might become in its repair, O Lord, that in that process of planning and rebuilding we might also streamline our lives for stewardship, for service, and for hospitality in the years ahead. But those are all tasks for tomorrow. We do not even know yet today the full measure of what we have lost. Today is for mourning. So let us grieve together as those who know the world is broken, but who yet hold hope of its restoration. A moment of silence is observed. Then any who wish to speak aloud their specific expressions of grief may do so.  The leader then continues with these words read by all: Comfort us, O Lord, in the wake of what has overtaken us.  Shield us, O Lord, from the hurts  we cannot bear. Shelter us, O Lord,  in the fortress of your love. Shepherd us, O Lord, as we wake each new morning, faced with the burdens of a hard pilgrimage we would not have chosen. But as this is now our path, let us walk it in faith, and let us walk it bravely, knowing that you go always before us. Amen. Copyright 2017 by Douglas McKelvey [Every Moment Holy is available for pre-order in the Rabbit Room Store.]

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For this week’s reading and discussion, we’re digging into Chapters 9-12. As Walter’s story progresses and we come to the conclusion of Stevenson’s efforts to free him, we’ll also take a look at justice regarding the mentally ill and women in poverty. As always, feel free to join the discussion at your own pace. You can comment below on this week’s questions or visit the conversation at the forum. Here are few new questions for you to consider… After how Walter’s hearing went in chapter 9, were you surprised by the judge’s decision in chapter 11? Why do you think things turned out that way? “I wasn’t exactly sure how to manage the family’s expectations. I felt I was supposed to be the cautionary voice that prepared family members for the worst even while I urged them to hope for the best… But I was developing a maturing recognition of the importance of hopefulness in creating justice. How can hope create justice? (p 219) “Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point.” Read and reflect on 2 Corinthians 1:3-7. How has someone mitigated for you? Is there someone you can mitigate for? Click here to join the discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum If you’re just joining us, you can catch up here: Book Group Introduction and Reading Schedule Week 1 Questions and Discussion Week 2 Questions and Discussion

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure and honor of talking with Douglas McKelvey about Every Moment Holy, his forthcoming book of liturgies crafted to consecrate and narrate us through the ordinary rhythms of our lives. The book will be available in just a few short weeks, and you can check out its website here. Drew: In light of your book of liturgies, I want to begin by acknowledging that the very word “liturgy” is coming back into vogue with Christians in our culture. It seems that we’re reawakening to the fact that liturgies can be useful and not just rote, life-sucking words we say over and over again. What’s your story with liturgy? Douglas: Well, I have a weird journey. It started when I was six years old. Both my parents had what I can’t truly describe as anything other than supernatural experiences. Those experiences woke them up to the idea that God is real and wants a relationship with us. They had no real theological foundation, however, so as a family we were swept into the backwaters of the neo-Pentecostal tradition. It wasn’t a Pentecostal denomination, though—we essentially became part of a cult, a personality cult comprised of about forty people. Over the decade or so we were there, the pastor exercised more and more control over people’s lives in a very unhealthy way. I’ve referred to it jokingly as the First Church of Demonology, because in my ten years there, I can’t remember learning anything about Jesus. I heard a lot about demons, so I often went home terrified. I’d lie awake in bed afraid that I was possessed and things like that. By the time I was sixteen, my parents realized that this just wasn’t right and we had to get out. There was this sense that you can choose truth or you can choose beauty, but there’s nothing holy about beauty. Douglas McKelvey I went to a Christian university that was completely whacked out, theologically. I realized then that I didn’t have a theological foundation by which to evaluate any of the hundreds of ideas that were being thrown at me. Halfway through my senior year I prayed, “God, I still believe you’re real. I believe Jesus is your son. Beyond that, I don’t know what’s true. So if it’s all right with you, I’m just going to check out until I graduate and then start to think about what’s true.” And that’s basically what I did. It was a dark time, but in hindsight I saw it as providential. I had to reach that point where all the bad ideas were leveled, leaving the most basic foundation of Christianity for me to build upon going forward. So there was a period of a few years after that when I floated around trying to find a tradition to cling to. One of the things I encountered during that time was an Episcopal church. And that was the first time I was exposed to a liturgical service. The prayers from the Book of Common Prayer—when we read those aloud, there was this instinctive response of, “This is something I can trust.” I was so used to being on my guard about everything I ever heard in church because so much of it was garbage. I didn’t know what was true. Drew: And then here’s this Book of Common Prayer, which is time-tested. It’s not just one person talking; it’s a book that’s very purposefully crafted. Douglas: Yes. And that experience at the Episcopal church was a sort of foreshadowing of what was to come. By my mid-twenties, I finally landed in a place where, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could relax and trust what I heard from the pulpit. There were aspects of the faith that had so much more meaning for me than they ever had before. One of the things that I began to recognize was that these old prayers are so thoughtful. They articulate so beautifully the things I’m experiencing and feeling before I’ve been able to pull it out, look at it from the outside, and name it. There was always someone long ago, in some cases hundreds of years or longer, who sat there and did the hard, prayerful work, and in many cases I believe the Spirit-led work, of sorting through these meandering pathways of the human heart, and the truths of Scripture brought to bear on that, to give them articulation in words that still resonate with us today. Through that experience, I began to think that maybe I could offer my gifts as a writer to the church. Drew: Something that strikes me about the Book of Common Prayer’s many liturgies is how sturdy they are. You can really lean on them. Like you said, somebody a hundred years ago wrote this, and yet I can throw my own particular experience onto it and lean up against it. It’s sturdy enough to hold my story. There’s a paradox there that’s incredible to me. And you wrote these liturgies for people to do that very same thing with. It’s poetry to be spoken by people in their particular moments of life. A lot of it can be extracted and called a poem, but it’s to be read aloud in a specific moment. What was it like writing for that purpose, as opposed to merely writing a poem? Douglas: As far as the craft side of it goes, my vision from the beginning was for Every Moment Holy to be a book with an aesthetic beauty to it. We wanted readers to be able to pick up the book and casually read parts of it to enjoy whatever aspect of poetry there is in it, as well as the artwork. But that goal of enjoyability was always balanced against the goal of functionality. It couldn’t devolve into abstract poetry. Drew: It’s useful. Douglas: Yes, and that’s the thing: it had to be utilitarian as well. Drew: And that is quite an amazing thing in a time that wants to divorce art from usefulness. We all carry that assumption: for something to be beautiful it must also be useless. It seems that your book on the whole is working for a redemption of utility as something that can be beautiful and of beauty as something that can be useful. Douglas: That’s important to me because I did grow up in churches and religious traditions of aesthetic impoverishment. There was this sense that you can choose truth or you can choose beauty, but there’s nothing holy about beauty. Drew: We can even become suspicious of beauty’s alluring qualities—be careful when you watch a movie that captures your imagination because it’s probably feeding you lies! Right? I picked that up somehow, somewhere along the way. Douglas: Yes, there’s this suspicion of beauty as not having any place within the Christian journey, but there’s also this impoverishment of story. There was no understanding of how wired we are for both story and poetry. It was a long journey for me to recognize that God is a poet, and that one of the ways his poetry is expressed is that there are deeper layers of his meaning and beauty embedded in creation than we could ever hope to fathom or exhaust. And that recognition was crucial for me. As I was growing up, I knew from an early age that I had a gift for words. Early on, I wrote flippantly. It was a spigot I could turn on anytime I wanted. Looking back now, there was some nice word choice there, the rhythm of the language was interesting, but there was no real meaning under the surface. Drew: You were playing. Douglas: I was playing, and I didn’t realize the difference between that and actually doing the hard work of expressing something true. When I began to develop a more coherent theology, writing became much more difficult because I now had a responsibility to be faithful to the larger story in which we all find ourselves. Drew: You needed to maintain that integrity between your world and the created order. Drew: And I felt that as I read these liturgies. I keep coming back to several of them, finding new details each time. One in particular I wanted to hear your story on was “A Liturgy For Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why.” Douglas: That was one of the very last ones I finished. It had been on my list for months, but as we were coming down into that final week before the deadline, I didn’t see any way to start a new one and get it finished with all the editing that still needed to happen on old ones. Two years ago, before I ever pitched the idea of this book, I had brainstormed ideas for some of the liturgies. Somewhere early on in that process, I had thought of this idea, “A Liturgy For Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why.” Then a few months ago, we opened up the process to people in the Rabbit Room community to suggest some ideas. Heidi Johnston from Northern Ireland submitted a request for a liturgy “For Those Feeling an Unexplained Sadness.” I put it on the list, and then at some point, I realized those two ideas were essentially the same. So I put it on the short list, but as time passed, it didn’t look like I’d be able to get to it. Then Heidi and her family came to Nashville to visit and our families got to spend some time together. At dinner we talked about that idea and I told her I didn’t know if I could get to it. Then two of my daughters both said, “Dad, that is the liturgy that we would most want to read.” Drew: I second that! This particular liturgy reminds me of how you said you were hoping for there to be layer upon layer to come back to. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface with this one. Here are a few lines that grabbed me: “We pine for all the children born into these days of desolation, whose regal robes were torn to tatters before they were even swaddled in them.” “…aligning ourselves with the self protective lie that would have us kill our best hopes just to keep our disappointments half-confined.” The idea of sanctifying sadness, that our tears could be an “intercession newly forged of holy sorrow.” And for whatever reason, this last line gets me the most: “Anticipating the day when you will take the ache of all creation and turn it inside out like the shedding of an old gardener’s glove.” Is there anything specific you could share about the writing of those lines? Douglas: They all came about in a multiplicity of ways and for various reasons. Some of them are distillations of ideas I have considered for years. Let’s take for example that line about killing hope to avoid disappointment: I have chewed on that one for maybe a dozen years, and have articulated it in other ways in other places. It’s a dynamic that is so common to us as humans. Funnily enough, it reminds me of The Matrix—there’s an explanation in the first movie for why life in the Matrix isn’t this beautiful paradise: they tried that and the humans rejected it because somehow without all the grief and sorrow and everything, they wouldn’t accept it as reality. We have this aversion to the idea that the good news is actually real. Douglas McKelvey We have this aversion to the idea that the good news is actually real. Imagine the disappointment if we completely embraced it, hung everything on it, didn’t hold back some of our emotion to protect ourselves just in case, and then found out the good news wasn’t true. Drew: But then that risk is itself part of the gospel. Leave everything. You have to give up your life for the good news. Douglas: Right. So I think that dynamic is such an important thing for us to observe in ourselves. Even as those who believe we have a King who is returning and bringing with him the fullness of a Kingdom where everything will somehow be redeemed—and we can’t imagine how because of the depth of grief and sorrow we’ve experienced in this life, yet we believe it is somehow true—even as those who have embraced this story, we still tend to pull back, to protect ourselves, to instinctively keep hedging our bets by investing hope in other things that are more immediate. Drew: You’re reminding me of a Frederich Buechner quote. He prays over and over again, “You’re too good to be true, you’re too good to be true.” But then at the end he prays, “You’re too good not to be true.” Douglas: Yes, and I think that’s why we have to keep reorienting ourselves to what our true hope is, but also acknowledge our tendency to numb ourselves to how much we really hope for it. We will always want to chase other things. If you open to this longing for the good news to be true and live into that longing—that’s an ache if there ever was one. [Every Moment Holy will be released this November. Pre-orders begin October 5th. Visit the website for more information.]

This year’s annual fundraising event, Rabbit Room LIVE, is shaping up to be an amazing night of music. In addition to performers like Andrew Peterson, Andy Gullahorn, Jill Phillips, Eric Peters, and many others, we’ve got a couple of extra special guests this year. Let me take just a moment to introduce you to one of them. We’re super-excited to  welcome Sho Baraka to the stage this year (and he’ll be around to speak in a Hutchmoot session as well). I wrote a post a few weeks ago call “Crooked: My Hiphop Odyssey” and if you read that, you may recognize Sho’s name. I was first introduced to his music by Randall Goodgame and Ben Shive who told me I had to listen to Sho’s newest album, Narrative. Music advice from good friends is best heeded, and this album is no exception. It’s outside what I’m used to listening to, but I immediately connected with it on multiple levels. I was first sucked in by how literary it was—Sho sings about and quotes from writers like C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton in songs that at times are pure fun and at others are handling difficult social and theological subjects with wit and elegance. Humble Beast exists in humility to disciple God’s people and advance God’s kingdom through beautiful acts of creativity and theology for the worship of the triune God. Out of this mission comes Humble Beast’s four major distinctives: Creativity, Humility, Theology, Doxology. And beneath those playful lyrics lays an always fascinating bed of music that draws on jazz, R&B, and Motown to create songs that are constantly surprising and easy to listen to. On top of that, Sho is part of a Rabbit Room-like community called Humble Beast that draws artists together around the gospel. Call me a fan. We’re super excited to welcome Sho to the Rabbit Room community this year, and we can’t wait for you to hear and meet him. He’ll be playing at RR LIVE, which will be live-streamed across the globe (!), and he’ll join Ben Shive for a Hutchmoot session on the mysterious art of songwriting. Rabbit Room LIVE tickets are available to the public for just $10 in advance. Get yours here. If you can’t make the show, you’ll be able to live-stream it for free (more information to come), and please consider supporting the Rabbit Room’s mission with a donation or membership. Click here for more information on becoming a member or to make a tax-deductible gift. Here’s one of my favorite songs off Sho’s newest album. It’s called “Fathers.” I have a hunch you’ll love it as much as I do.

This is the wrong day to feel this way. It’s 9/11, and even without the memory of such a horrific strategy, Mother Nature is declaring war in a number of places. Hurricanes and earthquakes, nuclear threats and political lunacy. I almost feel bad to say that I feel the way I do. But I know this feeling and it’s worth exploring and explaining. It only comes around so often. It’s the clearing. * * * The first day like this came in my mid-twenties, after a year-long fall to the lowest point of my life. I’d lost my job and my girlfriend. My car was repossessed and creditors called me incessantly. An infinite loop of poor choices, informed by my poor character and complete lack of integrity, had left me with nothing meaningful for which to live. It was the first and only time I’ve ever felt suicidal. I’d experienced my undoing and I knew it was totally and completely my fault. For one full calendar year, I’d driven or flown to various ministry job leads all over the U.S. only to be told, “We’ve decided to go with someone else.” I heard that phrase nearly 40 times during those 12 months. After the final “no” came on the one-year anniversary of getting fired in the first place, I gave up all hope. I’d lost hope before, felt depressive before, been sad for days or even weeks on end, but I’d never once felt the complete absence of hope. Into this vacuum stepped a close friend, about two weeks after it started. I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t even getting out of bed most days, but Jay came one day and said, “Get up. You’re coming to church with me.” I knew he wasn’t leaving, so I did so, took a quick shower and went with him. I refused to sit with him and any churchy friends he had, so I remember rebelling by sitting in the back row (take that, God). My hope was to make an appearance to appease my friend and then go back home to do nothing. Instead I found the first clearing of my life. The sermon that day was all about me. It could have been for everyone else, but I knew that day was also all for me. I wept uncontrollably on one of those cushioned, stackable metal chairs that every church has ever purchased since 1987. I waited in the world’s longest line to meet the pastor for no reason at all. I just knew I had to say something. After a few minutes of conversation, he asked me to get coffee on Tuesday. He offered me a clearing. My life was never the same after that meeting over coffee. Matt Conner Two days later, I told him my entire story. He asked me to join his church staff then and there. It was the most irresponsible hiring in the history of employment decision. I had no resume. He had no official opening. No church or organization should ever hire someone that way. But in that moment, I’d been running for so long, deeper and deeper into the darkest forest I’d ever known. I had no way out. He offered me a clearing. My life was never the same after that meeting over coffee. * * * A clearing or glade is a literal breath of fresh air. Inside of a densely wooded area, a large tree might fall over due to a lightning strike or strong wind. The resulting damage will knock over other trees and forest growth to create a new opening. Within the resulting clearing, daylight breaks through and fresh air rushes in. Birds populate the trees near the newly opened space above. New flowers grow on the forest floor; old growth leans toward the light. Smaller species of trees can grow in glades, diversifying the forest’s ecosystem since new growth is not overpowered and overshadowed by huskier, more dominant species. New flowers and trees mean new birds and animals and insects. A clearing brings new life. * * * It’s been a heckuva year. It’s been a helluva last six months. The last three months? A nightmare. A move back to the Midwest. A move back into ministry. A move away from friendships now former and a move toward new ones. All of these things can be good or bad, since moves themselves are neutral, but these changes have been hard for me personally. I loved Nashville. I loved writing full-time. Those around me seemed more excited about the possibilities ahead than I did. Digging back into the church has proven tough on my end. It took me some time to adjust to the notion of being somewhere at a set time like the rest of the planet. Writing on your own schedule has a way of spoiling a person, I’ve learned. But the adjustments didn’t stop there. The expectations to say the right thing, to have something meaningful to say most hours of the day. The need to watch what you say, do or even post online (like this). Working for a church is just an odd vocation. That last line is true of any church. Specifically, over the last few months, however, it’s become something more than odd. It’s become toxic. The deeper into this forest I’ve wandered, the more the branches became gnarled and twisted. Unhealthy leadership patterns rooted deep. Branches bent toward power and control. To be honest, I’ve wondered on several occasions whether I had the stamina to even walk this path any further. Then recently came a break of sorts. Some people have left, including several leaders. Lots of people grieving. Lots of changes coming. The nightmare somehow becoming worse. Or that’s what I thought at least. * * * We had a staff meeting today. We prayed for each other, the church and our community. We discussed details from the previous days and shaped events for the weeks to come . We made lists, answered questions, divided responsibilities. We did what we do every week. We also laughed. We laughed a lot. We shared the confusion and pain of the journey to this point and our joy and excitement of the road ahead. After months of heavy meetings and hearts, the room felt light. It hasn’t felt that way in a long time. Together, I believe we’ve stumbled on a way out of this chaos. I know what’s ahead. I’ve seen it before and the feeling is unforgettable. We’ve needed this clearing.

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This week, we’re looking at Chapters 5-8, but please feel free to continue talking about last week’s questions if something catches your attention. You’re welcome to jump in on any angle of the discussion, no matter where you are in the reading. As you can see, this book takes an unflinching look at some challenging subjects — justice, race, crime, capital punishment — so here’s a little side note to anyone who might be reading and struggling with the material for any reason. There are many places on the Internet for heated debates, but The Rabbit Room isn’t one of them. We hope you feel the freedom to dialogue without fear. We hope you’ll find this a place for civil and challenging conversations, and we want this to be a welcoming space for you, no matter where you’re coming from. And now, on to this week’s reading… “I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?” Walter’s sister Armelia vocalizes the family’s pain and fears, and asks what they are supposed to tell their children. (p 93) How would you answer her? What narratives have you believed about police, crime, and the justice system? I held him and told him as gently as I could, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. ” I’d never held anyone who gripped me as tightly as that child or who cried as hard or as long… When I left the jail, I was more angry than sad. I kept asking myself, “Who is responsible for this? How could we ever allow this?” Who is the “we” who caused Charlie’s abuse? (124) Where are we in the “we”? Many poor and minority victims complained that they were not getting calls or support from local police and prosecutors. Many weren’t included in the conversations about whether a plea bargain was acceptable or what sentence was appropriate… The expansion of victim’s rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others. Why are some victims more protected and valued than others? (p 143) What needs to change in order for victims to get the support they need? Most adults convicted of the kinds of crimes with which Trina, Ian, and Antonio were charged are not sentenced to life imprisonment without parole… Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to adult prosecution and punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant the most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. What are the laws in your state regarding juvenile offenders? Can you recall any local cases of children being tried in adult courts? Where are those kids now? One more thing: In Chapter 5, Stevenson references W. E. B. Du Bois’ short story “Of the Coming of John.” You can find the text and audio of the story here, if you’d like to read it. Click here to join the conversation at The Rabbit Room Forum If you’re just joining us, you can catch up here: Book Group Introduction and Reading Schedule Week 1 Questions and Discussion